VISUAL ART

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MARK WALLINGER MARK Turner Prize winner makes his mark in simultaneous Edinburgh and Dundee exhibitions

Making your mark is everything if you’re an artist, whichever side you’re coming from. It’s evident in this expansive body of largely recent work by Mark Wallinger, which runs parallel in galleries across two separate cities. Based largely around the 66 works that make up Wallinger’s id Paintings, the twin shows focus on a fascination with symmetry that led him to pursue a more instinctive and personalised line of inquiry than his more overtly politically driven works. That period arguably peaked with Wallinger’s 2007 Turner Prize winner, ‘State Britain’, a recreation of Brian Haw’s tented anti- Iraq protest outside Westminster. That the twice-his-height-sized paintings that resulted are literally handmade speaks volumes about where Wallinger is coming from today.

‘The id Paintings grew out of a series of works I call self-portraits,’ Wallinger says, referring to the group of paintings consisting of various iterations of the letter ‘I’.  Wallinger found himself painting works by hand, alternating between left and right. ‘It was one of those rare moments when the penny dropped and something metamorphosed in a way where I could get a degree of symmetry. It was a way of creating in the moment so that every mark had its mirror image.’

Wallinger mentions Rorschach, psychoanalysis and Freud in an ongoing pursuit of the naked ‘I’ he is clearly relishing. ‘It has been rather pleasant,’ he says. ‘It’s nice to get to this age and still be able to feel this way.’ (Neil Cooper) Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Sat 4 Mar– Sun 2 Jul; Dundee Contemporary Arts, Sat 4 Mar–Sun 4 Jun.

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1 Feb–31 Mar 2017 THE LIST 91