Gillian Wearing Time Travels for Vincent Award

Gillian Wearing

The Turner Prize winner is in line to collect the Dutch art prize for ‘influencing the development of contemporary art in Europe’ by posing as herself from 30 years ago in a piece called Me as an Artist in 1984, the first year of the Turner Prize before Wearing was a professional artist.

The Vincent Award was created in 2000 and given every two years in the Netherlands to a mid-career artist whose work is judged to be “appreciably influencing the development of contemporary art in Europe.” Wearing is one of five shortlisted artists for the Vincent awards.

If the artist is successful she would be the first British artist to win the award.

Originally Wearing left school in Birmingham with no qualifications and ended up living a meager existence in London. It is from that period that the artist has recreated a photograph of herself, using a mask of her old self. The following year Wearing went to the Chelsea School of Art and then on to Goldsmiths eventually becoming part of the YBA movement.

The artist is currently displaying work of a similar nature at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, which opened at the weekend in which Wearing poses as two of her heroes – Diane Arbus and Robert Mapplethorpe; as another manipulation of the artist’s identity. Wearing, who won the Turner Prize in 1997, has also included a film from 2010 called Bully for the show in The Hague.

The prize exists as a celebration of European art and is currently juxtaposed with the political debate in the UK regarding joining The Europe Union.

As Wearing aims to become the first Briton to win, her counterpart on the shortlist, the Berlin-based Willem de Rooij is aiming to become the first Dutch artist to take the prize; taking inspiration from the Gemeentemuseum’s large Mondrian collection. The artist has hung an early Mondrian which is slowly illuminated in a room with the strangely eerie sound of Greenland pack dogs howling.

The other artists in the running for the prestigious prize are Frenchman Pierre Huyghe, German Manfred Pernice and Albanian Anri Sala.

The winner, will receive €50,000 (£39,000), and will be announced on 21 November.

Gemeentemuseum The Hague until 1 February

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