Mark Wallinger is Innocent

Location

Country: UK
City: London
Place: Ministry of Justice, 102 Petty France

This text-based work with its pithy sentence ‘MARK WALLINGER IS INNOCENT’ was originally commissioned from the artist by the Ingleby Gallery in Edinburgh. Mark Wallinger created the work as part of the Billboard for Edinburgh, a public art project that has placed billboards every three months on the end wall of the Gallery’s building at 15 Calton Road, Edinburgh from 2008 to 2010. This print is a scaled down replica of the billboard. This intriguing work plays on the sort of graffiti that often appears on walls when people are believed to have been wrongly imprisoned. By using his name and displaying it on a public billboard Wallinger makes a wry comment on his artistic identity and growing celebrity status.  He also reflects on the notion of ‘innocence’ as relative and dependent on a tangential understanding of the associated ‘crime’. 

Mark Wallinger was born in Chigwell in Essex. He studied at Chelsea School of Art, from 1978 to 1981, and then at Goldsmiths College from 1983 to 1985. During the 1990s, the subject of sport and, in particular, horse racing, was the source for a number of his works. His successful shows at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham and the Serpentine in London contributed towards his selection for the Turner Prize in 1995, which was won by Damien Hirst. His works were also included in the controversial, but seminal, exhibition Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, which was held at the Royal Academy in London in 1997. His Ecce Homo, a life-size statue of Christ, was displayed on the ‘empty plinth’ in London’s Trafalgar Square over the turn of the millennium. In 2001 Wallinger represented Britain at the Venice Biennale exhibition of international contemporary art. In 2007 he was awarded the Turner Prize. In 2009 he won the Angel of the South competition and his work, a giant white horse, was installed in the landscape at Ebbsfleet in north Kent in 2012.

Places

Subjects

text-based work

Materials & Techniques

screenprint

Artist

Mark Wallinger (1959 - )

Title

Mark Wallinger is Innocent

Series Title

Billboard for Edinburgh

Edition

23/50

Date

2008

Medium

Screenprint

Dimensions

height: 38.20 cm, width: 45.80 cm

Acquisition

Purchased from Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, April 2009

Inscription

br: M Wallinger 2008 23/50

Provenance

Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

GAC number

18260/1