Cathy Wilkes

Born and raised in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Cathy Wilkes trained at Glasgow School of Art. 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.

Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966, Belfast, Northern Ireland) lives and works in Glasgow. She represented Great Britain at the 58th Venice Biennale in 2019 after having represented Scotland in 2005. She also participated in the International Exhibition of the Biennale in 2013. In 2017, she was awarded the inaugural Maria Lassnig Prize which led to her acclaimed solo exhibition at MoMA PS1, New York. Wilkes’ work was the subject of a touring exhibition that began at Tate Liverpool (2015) and travelled to LENTOS Kunstmuseum, Linz and the Museum Abteiberg, Moenchengladbach (2015–2016).