Mark Wallinger: Credo

Mark Wallinger is one of the most consistently surprising and ambitious British artists of the last fifteen years. His diverse work, using a variety of media including painting, photography, video, sculpture and drawing, has always had a restless energy that is both humorous and intelligently provocative. Credo at Tate Liverpool presents an opportunity to experience works from all points of Wallinger's career over the last fifteen years.

Mark Wallinger came to prominence in Britain in the mid 1980s and has since earned an international reputation. He attended Chelsea School of Art and Goldsmiths College in London and has had solo exhibitions all over Europe and in the US. He was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1995. In the summer of 1999 Wallinger unveiled a new sculpture, Ecce Homo, in Trafalgar Square, London, to great critical and popular acclaim. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2001.

Wallinger's work examines personal orientation within culture, society and various political climates. Perhaps it emphasises that seeing is believing, that we can have a full experience now and not have to wait for an unknowable afterlife that may never present itself beyond its wishful characterisation within our mortal faith. We operate in a culture of spectacle and visions, and the rules of the visible world are played with in Wallinger's work, mined for the truths they can offer up. But it is not only vision that plays a role in this work, language is put to use, becoming incantatory and nonsensical, but also deeply expressive of complex human experience.