Mark Wallinger's 30-Year Career Celebrated at Prato Museum's 30th Anniversary

The Centro Pecci in Prato, Italy, marks its 30th anniversary with a major exhibition of British artist Mark Wallinger (born 1959, Chigwell), curated by former director Cavallucci. The show, titled with a pun on 'Mark' (both name and verb meaning 'to mark'), presents sculptures, photographs, videos, and installations arranged thematically rather than chronologically. It opens with 'Ecce Homo' (1999-2000), the first contemporary sculpture installed in Trafalgar Square, London, now reinterpreted as a symbol of the migrant. 'Threshold to the Kingdom' (2000), made for the Jubilee, and 'Passport Control' (1988), a series of self-portraits with stereotypical ethnic features, gain new urgency amid current migration and security crises. Wallinger explores identity and ego through 'ID paintings' made after psychoanalysis, using hand-applied acrylics in symmetrical forms, and 'Self-portraits' that obsessively repeat the word 'I' in styles from primitive sculpture to Mondrian and Malevich. He also inscribed his name on over 2,000 bricks across London buildings. 'Construction Site' (2011) is a video merging earth, sea, and sky, reflecting on welfare, workplace safety, and wage equity. The site-specific installation 'Pietre Prato' uses hundreds of locally sourced river stones, each numbered, to critique humanity's desire to classify reality, evoking meanings from tombstones to protest stones. The exhibition runs at Centro Pecci in 2018.