Visual Arts

Turner Prize winner and eminent artist Mark Wallinger has brought his keen eye to Leeds, as part of a touring exhibition programme run by one of London's most prestigious galleries - the Hayward.

These exhibitions often embrace an eclectic range of historical and contemporary works that offer insights into the artist's own creative process as well as relationships between the works chosen.

2007 Turner Prize winner, Wallinger is one of Britain's most original, intellectually curious and unpredictable artists whose work has often attracted as many brickbats as bouquets. His work aims to bring together two realms where the mundane and transcendent meet. His most famous piece is Ecce Homo, his anti-heroic sculpture for the Fourth Plinth in Trafalgar Square, in which an ordinary man becomes a life-sized Christ.

Mark Wallinger himself is thrilled at the prospect: "I was delighted to be offered the opportunity. I have always been interested in how we define and are defined by thresholds and boundaries, the events of history. The works in the exhibition use illusion, artifice and dislocating devices to look at our accidental time and place in the world afresh."

Time and Relative Dimension in Space

This new exhibition at Leeds Art Gallery provides special insights into Wallinger's thought process and interests. The title and many of the themes in the exhibition take their inspiration from the story of the Russian Linesman, Tofik Bakhramov (he's actually Azerbaijani - the national stadium in Baku is named after him!), who is (in)famous for his decision to indicate that Geoff Hurst's shot went over the line in the 1966 World Cup Final between England and West Germany (who had just eliminated the Soviet Union team in the semi-finals) and made him a hero to English football fans!

For his selection, Wallinger has created an exhibition that investigates many of the issues that have concerned him as an artist over the past 25 years, in particular ideas of boundaries, thresholds and arbitrary divides, whether physical, political, psychological or metaphysical.

Navigating almost 2000 years of history from an early Roman double-headed marble bust of Dionysus and Silenus, through popular 'ViewMaster' stereoscopic photographs and 18th Century trompe l'oeil paintings, to a woodcut by Albrecht Dürer showing a device for rendering objects in two dimensions, the show aims to explore the ambiguities present in our own perceptions and how the lines between fact and fiction are often blurred and manipulated.

The show includes Mark's own work Time and Relative Dimensions in Space (2001), a life-sized mirrored representation of Doctor Who's Tardis, first shown at the Venice Biennale.

'Mark Wallinger Curates the Russian Linesman' runs at Leeds Art Gallery on The Headrow from Saturday 16 May until Sunday 28 June 2009.