Overview
How It Is features artworks in many different media spanning almost all of Tim Head’s artistic career. There are several loans from the college’s Frangenberg Collection which contains 60 works by Tim Head, including the spectacular piece Winter. Two other photographs from the mid-1970s, Ambidextrous and Equilibrium II, are pieces which have been restored in Loughborough University’s specialist photographic unit. Ambidextrous is shown with its colour restored and Equilibrium II is now exhibited for the first time ever. Several other photographs, from the 1980s (all from the collection), are powerful protest-pieces about plastic waste and environmental pollution. Sadly, their messages are even more relevant today.
More recent works include four Slow Life drawings from 2002-4 and a digital embroidery, Siren I, realised this year by the digital embroidery specialist Bee King. What the selection illustrates is the extraordinary fecundity of the artist over many decades, the continued relevance of his concerns, and the potency of his aesthetic achievements.
This exhibition was curated by Professor Phillip Lindley.
About the artist
Tim Head won the John Moores Painting Prize in 1987 and is an artist of major significance who has exhibited internationally for several decades. Themes of fundamental importance can be traced throughout his long and consistently innovative career: a conflicted fascination with consumerism; a rage against exploitative big business and the armaments industries; his environmental and political activism; his revulsion against factory farming and his hostility to genetic modification. All these concerns seem remarkably prescient of concerns which are widespread today. So, too, is his dread of a nuclear Armageddon.
The formal qualities of Head’s art are similarly radical and often seem to reveal a psychic alienation, deliberately unsettling or disorientating the spectator. Repulsion and attraction are enmeshed in complex ways, as can be seen in the ambivalence of his interest in signage, logos and packaging, which he often endows with sinister overtones, but also, sometimes, with an extraordinary grandeur and an undefinable spirituality. Head experiments incessantly and obsessively. He forensically scrutinises the everyday, then dissects, abstracts and re-presents it, so that its elements appear equivocally beautiful and disturbingly unfamiliar.
Viewing the exhibition
The exhibition will be open to the public from Sunday 15 October.
Opening Times: Saturdays and Sundays 10.00-17.00, until Sunday 21 January.
Please note that the exhibition is occasionally unavailable, for instance during graduations.
It is advisable to contact the Porters' Lodge in advance of your visit (01223 335900).
Access
This exhibition is on display in the Combination Room on the first floor of our main building. It has step-free access with a lift and there is an accessible toilet located on the first floor of the building.
For more details please view our AccessAble guide.
About Wolfson exhibitions
Wolfson has an established programme of exhibitions and artistic events which take place throughout the year and are framed by its modernist architecture, beautiful landscaped gardens and embedded into academic life.
The art on show is enjoyed by both the academic and wider community. Exhibitions are open to the general public, for students and Fellowship and visited by scholars, guests and visitors from around the world.
Wolfson has an established art exhibitions programme which has showcased the work of both renowned international artists and innovative emerging artists with the aim of stimulating reflection, discussion and debate.
You can find out more about exhibitions at Wolfson on the Arts page.