BRAUNSCHWEIG, GERMANY.- Kunstverein Braunschweig presents Mark Wallinger, on view through November 11, 2007. Mark Wallinger (b. 1959) is one of the circle of artists who, under the rubric “Young British Art”, caused a stir in the art world in the 1990s. Yet his themes and his artistic language differ from those of such colleagues as Tracey Emin, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, or Chris Ofili, who often employ direct provocation in the ways they present their subjects. Wallinger’s work explores the mechanisms of symbols, identities, and related codings — national, religious, cultural, or broadly social — in order to rearrange, ironically question, and re-stage them. Social and political involvement, and an interest in Western traditions, come together in his artistic praxis which employs media as various as painting, installation, film, photography, object, and performance.

Yet despite this versatility and the wide variety of his themes, one can make out something like a distinct “Wallinger effect” — discernible if not directly graspable — that runs through all of his works. This may have something to do with a certain very noticeable and perhaps also British irony, or with Wallinger’s deliberate hyperbolism — his appetite for the monumental, for grand gestures, and pathos. Or it may have to do with his artistic strategy of cunningly exploiting collective knowledge of cultural, historical, social, and frequently also religious traditions and values. Wallinger critically examines these traditions and values that have been laid down in us, as it were, by education and cultural background, and are thus open to us all, by means of interventions that are natural yet unexpected. Hence, he can say of himself that he is “more concerned with the world as it is than with the question as to what art is”.

In Hymn (1997), for instance, he sings a Victorian hymn disguised as a blind man holding a balloon with a self-portrait as a child. His voice, which is distorted and raised by helium gas to the pitch of a child’s, caricatures unthinking faith as childish and blind, a faith which, like the balloon at the end of the hymn, deflates. In 2001, he added a unicorn’s horn to the head of George Stubbs’s famous horse painting Whistlejacket. Mysteriously back lit, an icon of 18th-century British culture becomes a Ghost of bygone imperial splendour and power. Representing Britain at the Venice Biennale in the same year, he decorated the British pavilion with the Union Jack, replacing the flag’s red, white, and blue with the Irish flag’s orange, white, and green (Oxymoron). In 2004, dressed in a bear costume and visible to nocturnal strollers through the glass frontage, Wallinger trotted around the ground floor of Berlin’s New National Gallery designed by Mies van der Rohe for seven nights. The title Sleeper unites notions of Berlin as bastion of espionage and panic-mongering after 11 September in the heraldic beast of the city. In 2007, in the ground floor of the illustrious Tate Britain, he reconstructed the 40-metre long display that British citizen Brian Haw began erecting in London’s Parliament Square opposite Westminster Palace in 2001 in protest at the Iraq and Afghan wars and British involvement in them — and which the British Government took down last year after a hastily passed ban on demonstrations in the vicinity of government buildings (the Tate Britain though is within the restricted area).

Although Wallinger is one of the major British artists of his generation, the exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig is his first retrospective in Germany. His works have been exhibited in numerous international solo and group exhibitions (e.g. the current Sculpture Projects, Münster) and he himself has been nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. The exhibition in Braunschweig offers a comprehensive showing of Wallinger’s creative work for the ten-year period from 1996 to 2007 and will include film projections, photographs, objects, installations, and paintings. In addition, a new work is to be produced on site. Arranged neither chronologically nor thematically, the exhibition seeks to assign each work its appropriate space given the Kunstverein’s specific architectural features. The resulting tour is an outstanding presentation of Wallinger’s exceedingly diverse artistic praxis.

The exhibition is a collaboration with the Kunsthaus Aarau, Switzerland. The German/English catalogue to be published in Spring 2008 by jrp l ringier will contain texts by Yve-Alain Bois, Madeleine Schuppli, and Janneke de Vries. The exhibition in Braunschweig is supported by the Volkswagen Bank and the Henry Moore Foundation.