we are pro choice

source: artfundorg

This installation occupies an entire room and consists of a shop mannequin perched on a toilet; a table holding a glass and a broken clock; a ladder; and a stained painting on canvas, lying on the floor.
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source: tateorguk

Cathy Wilkes’s installations of objects, readymades and paintings are formally precise and contemplative. Their essentially diaristic and self-reflective forms are composed using a complex and liberated visual language. Her work, whilst in many ways uncompromisingly introspective, is characterized by direct, almost diagrammatic invocations of daily human experience.
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source: xavierhufkens

Born and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Cathy Wilkes trained at Glasgow School of Art and is part of the generation of artists who emerged in the mid-1990s. Wilkes is primarily known for her large-scale installations of seemingly disparate objects, many of which are distressed, damaged, altered or adapted. Her ensembles slowly evolve out of a working method that begins with the meticulous collection and selection of materials and ends with the measured task of arrangement, re-arrangement, making and re-making. The refined, physical manifestations of a continual process of intellectual introspection and existential questioning, Wilkes’s installations explore the multiplicity of meanings, both personal and universal, that objects are capable of evoking, or representing. Cathy Wilkes is also a painter. Her predominantly abstract works on canvas tend to mirror the intensive labour that goes into her installations – the canvases are worked on, set aside, scraped clean and worked on again. Previously incorporated into her sculptural environments, Wilkes’s paintings have gained greater autonomy in recent years.

Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966) represented Scotland at the Venice Biennale in 2005 and her work was included in The Encyclopedic Palace at the 55th Venice Biennale (2013). She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2008. Recent solo exhibitions include: I Give You All My Money, The Renaissance Society, University of Chicago (2012); Gesellschaft für aktuelle Kunst, Bremen (2011); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh (2011); Kunstverein, Munich (2011); Mummy’s Here, Studio Voltaire, London (2009); The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2008) and the Milton Keynes Gallery (2008).
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source: migrosmuseumch

Cathy Wilkes, 1966 in Belfast geboren, studierte an der Glasgow School of Art und an der Ulster University in Belfast. 1989 war sie Mitbegründerin der Women’s Library in Glasgow; sie organisierte Ausstellungen und arbeitete im Künstlerkollektiv «Elisabeth Go».

In raumgreifenden Installationen voller unterschwelliger Anspielungen arrangiert Cathy Wilkes gefundene Objekte mit kleinformatigen Gemälden und feinen geometrischen Gebilden aus Holz. Eine abgewetzte Gartenliege, wackelige Klapptische, ein ausgedienter Heizkörper sind die Protagonisten dieser Szenenbilder. Eine Patina aus Staub, Rost und Kratzern überzieht das Mobiliar und impliziert die Geschichte seines Gebrauchs.