Prehistoric Stonehenge to be recreated on Glasgow Green by Jeremy Deller
The Turner Prize-winner Jeremy Deller will be creating a plastic version of the mysterious stone monument as part of the city’s International Festival of the Visual Arts.
The work will be entitled ‘Sacrilege’, and will be revealed in Glasgow later this week, but will ultimately be transported to and displayed in London for the Olympic Games. It will be Deller’s first major public project in Scotland, and promotional images online show a walker standing in front of a carved pillar of stone.
Deller, in a rather cagey moment, hinted at the nature of the piece, saying ‘The public can go on it, as it were. The public can interact with it. It’s a big public thing in a public place.’ He believes it will be ‘an enjoyable experience’: ‘That’s what I’m hoping for, that people enjoy it, become part of it, as it were. It’s meant to be a celebratory thing. Hopefully, people’s interaction with it will bring out the character of the place. Hopefully people will respond to it in a Glaswegian manner.’
The 18-day Glasgow International Festival of Visual Art, opening on Friday (20 April 2012 – 7 May 2012), is now in its fifth edition. Showcasing work by more than 130 artists across nearly 50 of Glasgow’s best permanent and temporary exhibition venues, the Festival will bring together exhibitions by the best international and local artists. Directed by Katrina Brown, the programme will feature a series of newly-commissioned works that draw on a range of disciplines, including visual art, dance, film, music, performance and theatre.
Wolfgang Tillmans, winner of the Turner Prize in 2000 – the first ever photographer to win the award – will be staging his first solo exhibition in Sotland since 1995. The show will feature an exemplary range of Tillmans’ practice which over the past two decades has been thought to have redefined photography. First recognized in the early 1990s for his intensely affecting and unconventional images of friends and other young people in his social circle, he has developed a highly developed style of image making that encompasses a broad range of subjects and includes a powerfully unique presentation. In 2009 he was awarded the Kulturpreis der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Photographie.
Other highlights include the largest show to date in Scotland by Glasgow-based 2011 Turner Prize contender Karla Black, who will exhibit a series of new major sculptures in the grand ground floor of the Gallery of Modern Art (GoMA). The Festival will also see the first exhibition of works on paper by Glasgow-based 2009 Turner Prize winner Richard Wright at Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum.
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