ARAU.- Aargauer Kunsthaus presents Mark Wallinger, on view through November 16. Mark Wallinger – winner of the 2007 Turner Prize – shows his most important works of recent years in this large-scale survey exhibition. Wallinger is one of Britain's most famous artists internationally, not least since his splendid contribution at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Wallinger intelligently, and somewhat humorously, explores current social issues in his works. Using various media such as painting, video or installation, he focuses on matters that are of relevance to us all – religion, politics and cultural identity.

The London artist Mark Wallinger (*1959) belongs to the generation of British artists who caused such a stir on the international art scene in the 1990s under the heading "Young British Artists". Yet unlike other artists generally ascribed to this loosely knit group, Mark Wallinger's artistic idiom is brimming with astute irony; fleeting provocative gestures are not his thing.

Wallinger's works examine the mechanisms of symbols, identities and the associated codes – national, religious, cultural or general social – with the aim of reversing or ironically questioning them. His approach combines social and political involvement with an interest in western traditions. For this he uses different media such as painting, installation, film, photography, object or performance. The large presentation at the Aargauer Kunsthaus highlights Wallinger's flexibility with media and his diversity of themes. The exhibition has been conceived of as a survey and embraces about 25 works. These range from older, 1980s works like Passport Control (1988), the monumental installation Forever and Ever (2002) to his latest room installation Human Figure in Space (2007), which has so far never been shown in Europe. After quite some time, therefore, this show is the first to provide a broad overview of the work of this internationally renowned artist at a Swiss museum.

Mark Wallinger says of himself that he "prefers to deal with the world as it is, than with the question of what art is". His installation State Britain (2007) can be read in this sense. This monumental work plays a major role in the Aarau exhibition. It is a meticulous recreation of a more than 40-metre-long display which the British peace activist Brian Haw erected in front of the Houses of Parliament in London in 2001 and constantly expanded over a couple of years; he was protesting against British involvement in the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. In 2007 the British government prohibited demonstrations in the government district of London and also had the display dismantled. Mark Wallinger shifted this vivid expression of public opinion into the museum context by means of this precise recreation, thereby securing its survival. What is no longer tolerated in the public domain, finds an audience in the museum, where it can be discussed. In December 2007 Wallinger was awarded the Turner Prize, among other things, thanks to this work.

The exhibition at the Aargauer Kunsthaus is a collaboration with the Kunstverein Braunschweig, where it was already shown in a different form in autumn 2007. In Aarau, it's the first exhibition curated for the museum by its new director Madeleine Schuppli.