The exhibition of the British artist Gillian Wearing (Birmingham, 1963) at the IVAM forms part of the series of what we in the museum call the construction of “individual mythologies”, referring to the work of a broad range of artists who are very difficult to fit into a clear artistic category but who make a strong personal and social impact that produces a powerful discourse. The series of “other” and/or altered realities that Wearing has been showing in her photographs and videos since the early nineties makes her work a constant questioning of all the different identities that struggle to emerge in any human being. Since Wearing won the illustrious Turner Prize in 1997 her images and films have continued to unsettle and upset us, attracting and disturbing, acting as clear reflections, distorted or otherwise, of the most hidden corners of our own existence. The vast majority of the works exhibited at the IVAM belong to the last fifteen years, and so were not shown in the first exhibition that she had in Spain at the beginning of 2001. In fact, the photograph Rock ’n’ Roll 70, 2015 for example, and the video installation Your Views were made that very year and have never been exhibited before. Consequently, what we are seeing here is a very wide-ranging selection of works that provide us with a broad view of the interests and concerns underlying the work that Gillian Wearing has done in the last few years. If we had to reduce the rich variety of her artistic output to a few brief themes, we would say that one of her basic focuses is a constant concern with the construction of what we call personal identity. Accordingly, she does not hesitate to introduce aspects of the past (as in the series Family History, 2006) or even of what we might imagine that the future may mean for the people that she portrays. Nor is she worried (for example, in her video We Are Here, 2014) about mixing up things that the viewer does not know whether to classify as “real” or invented, experiences that are covered up or matters that remain concealed in the darkest recesses of our mind. When we are confronted with the images that Gillian Wearing creates (for example, in the video installation Secrets and Lies, 2009), we cannot help experiencing a profound feeling of strangeness, loss, remorse or even pain at the sight of a series of men and women baring themselves psychologically to the camera, as we see that one mask after another falls away from them in their search for an identity that they never attain because it always slips through their fingers. These are works that show difficult paths in which the individuals portrayed try both to project and to protect themselves, in which they attempt to express experiences that have an intense psychological and therapeutic content, but these are also profoundly political acts that reveal the involvement and participation of these individuals in questioning and casting doubt on who we are. 6 FFOORREEWWOORRDD José Miguel G. Cortés Director of the IVAM
Gillian Wearing
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