Gillian Wearing, the Turner Prize-winning British conceptual artist whose exhibit, Life: Gillian Wearing , will be Cincinnati Art Museum's contribution to October's citywide FotoFocus Biennial, will also receive the museum's Schiele Prize. It will be presented to her by Nathaniel Stein, the museum's Associate Curator of Photography, during a conversation with the artist at 7 p.m. on Oct. 3. Reservations are required at 513-721-ARTS or via cincinnatiartmuseum.org/wearing .
The exhibit, which will be up Oct. 5-Dec. 30, is an exclusive exhibition of Wearing’s lens-based art and includes four new works making their world premiere. Wearing won the Turner Prize in 1997 and was appointed O.B.E. in 2011 for services to art. She is known for "documenting strangers’ thoughts and confessions through film and photography, as well as re-presenting herself as other artists or family members through the use of masks and elaborate staging," the Art Museum says in a press release.
The museum also says that Life: Gillian Wearing "will chart new territory in the artist’s engagement with identity, self-revelation and contemporary media culture, exploring tensions between public and private life, the drive to tell our own secrets and know the secrets of others, and the blurry line between documentation and a constructed point of view."
She is the third recipient of the Schiele Prize, which honors the legacy of Marjorie Schiele, a Cincinnati artist whose bequest of the Hanke-Schiele Fund has made the award possible. The other recipients have been Sarah Vanderlip and Anila Quayyum Agha.
Schiele, who passed away in 2008, was Cincinnati-born and educated but lived most of her life in Paris and Monte Carlo. She studied art in France and traveled extensively until she fled from Europe to New York in 1940 due to World War II. In New York, she became a student and assistant to the French painter and writer Amédée Ozenfant, who introduced her to a band of expatriate artists that included Piet Mondrian, Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Lyonel Feininger and Max Ernst.
Upon returning to France In 1952, she exhibited her paintings in both solo and group exhibitions in. The Schiele Prize is meant to support an exhibition of paintings and sculpture by a living artist. You can read more about her life and prize in this 2013 CityBeat story.