What Is the Meaning of Life? These exhibitions at the Sainsbury Centre are here to guide you
20 August 2026 • Tabish Khan
Head to Norwich to contemplate the meaning of life while sitting inside a woven tree.
Tag: Gillian Wearing
Gillian Wearing (b. 1963, Birmingham, UK) uses photography, video, and performance to explore the boundaries between public identity and private self. Her works often invite participants to reveal hidden thoughts or step into alternate personas, creating portraits that blur confession, construction, and truth. Masks, anonymity, and staged encounters recur throughout her practice, exposing the fragile choreography of everyday life. Quietly incisive and psychologically attuned, Wearing examines how we present ourselves—and how we wish to be seen—turning the act of looking into a negotiation between reality and desire.
Paradigm Shift: Interview with Co-Curator Jefferson Hack and Associate Curator Susanna Davies-Crook
15 October 2025 • Mark Westall
We spoke with curators Jefferson & Susanna about the power of screen- based art, and how creativity continues to resist and reinvent in dark times.
Paradigm Shift – a major exhibition exploring new dimensions in Moving Image.
3 October 2025 • Mark Westall
180 Studios presents Paradigm Shift, a major exhibition that will present some of the most acclaimed moving image works from the 1970s to the present
WATCH: ‘Gillian Wearing. Dancing in Peckham’ in New York.
23 September 2024 • Mark Westall
Over the last several decades, Gillian Wearing’s work has chronicled confessions, taboos, and voyeuristic inclinations. Her videos and photographs often… Read More
The Top 5 Museum Exhibitions to see in London in August
6 August 2023 • Tabish Khan
Impressionism, gold, family, space and museums galore.
Gillian Wearing: Wearing Masks
2 November 2021 • Mark Westall
Profoundly empathetic and psychologically intense, Gillian Wearing’s photographs, videos, sculptures, and paintings probe the tensions between self and society in an… Read More
Gillian Wearing’s tribute to Diane Arbus unveiled in New York
19 October 2021 • Mark Westall
Public Art Fund presents British conceptual artist Gillian Wearing’s life-size bronze sculpture Diane Arbus—a tribute to the legendary photographer. Arbus was a lifelong… Read More
30 contemporary British artists including Damien Hirst, Lubaina Himid, Gillian Wearing, Rachel Whiteread create miniature art works for model art gallery.
30 March 2021 • Mark Westall
Pallant House Gallery has announced a unique response to creativity during the coronavirus pandemic. The Gallery has commissioned a model art gallery that will feature original miniature artworks from over 30 leading contemporary British artists
The Top 5 Art Exhibitions to see in late October
12 October 2020 • Tabish Khan
The Top 5 Art Exhibitions to see in late October include Birth, death, films, social media and a mask.
Gillian Wearing
8 September 2020 • Mark Westall
Gillian Wearing continues her exploration of identity, fiction, reality and the mask presenting a series of new works on paper, board, sculpture and film. Conceived over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, the exhibition focuses mainly on works made during the lockdown. Her new watercolour portraits have all been created in this time of self-reflection motivated by isolation.
NEW ORDER: ART, PRODUCT, IMAGE 1976-1995
22 July 2019 • Mark Westall
New Order: Art, Product, Image 1976-1995 is a group exhibition selected by Michael Bracewell that surveys identity and image in British art, culture and society between 1976 and 1995.
GILLIAN WEARING new solo exhibition Family Stories
16 October 2017 • Mark Westall
Gillian Wearing’s solo exhibition at SMK presents sculpture, video and photo works created from 1992 to the present day with a focus on family relations
The Top 9 Art Exhibitions to see this week in London
21 May 2017 • Tabish Khan
Not 5 but 9 exhibitions to catch this week
Inspired, perhaps, by the surge of the selfie, there was a glut of self-portrait shows last year, and the trend continues.
3 May 2017 • Paul Carey-Kent
Inspired, perhaps, by the surge of the selfie, there was a glut of self-portrait shows last year, and the trend continues.
Gillian Wearing and Claude Cahun: Behind the mask, another mask at National Portrait Gallery
7 April 2017 • Lee Sharrock
This stunning exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery brings together two seemingly disparate female artists, their careers divided by more than seven decades, but with rather more in common aesthetically and philosophically than it would first appear.
Turner Prize winner Gillian Wearing’s ‘A Room With Your Views’ to be premiered at HOUSE and Brighton Festival
17 February 2016 • Mark Westall
‘A Room With Your Views’, by Gillian Wearing to premier at HOUSE
COMING SOON: Rack ‘em up: a YBA Editions Exhibition: Hirst, Lucas, Turk, Coventry, Chapman, Landy, Wearing and More!
19 February 2015 • Staff
Rack ‘em up: British Contemporary Editions, 1990 – 2000 focusses on editions produced by the so-called YBA generation of artists. The survey, the first of its kind ever staged, brings together works by all of the leading figures of the period, including Keith Coventry, Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas and Gavin Turk, and seeks to capture the irreverent and exuberant flavour of the era.
Gillian Wearing, Yinka Shonibare and Pure Evil announced for Museums at Night Connect! Competition
13 February 2015 • Mark Westall
Connect! is the national competition that gives members of the public the chance to win a leading contemporary artist to create a unique event at their local museum or gallery during Museums at Night, the UK’s after hours festival of arts, culture and heritage.
Tabish’s Top 7 Art Exhibitions to see in London this week
9 November 2014 • Tabish Khan
This week’s top picks include abstract nature, suspended cyborgs, confessions, Philippine politics, a peep hole, battlefields and oversized pills.
FEATURE: Gillian Wearing A Real Birmingham Family @ikongallery
11 October 2014 • Mark Westall
A Real Birmingham Family is a project from Turner Prize-winning artist Gillian Wearing led by Ikon that has been over three years in the making.
ART NEWS: Art on the Underground pops-up at Piccadilly Circus
14 March 2014 • Mark Westall
Idris Khan Gillian-Wearing Wolfgang Tillmans Art on the Underground is set to launch its first ever pop-up retail space at… Read More
2Q13 Women Artists | Women Collectors @The Lloyds Club Private View: Wednesday 18th September
18 September 2013 • Mark Westall
The exhibition will feature over 100 contemporary artworks made by women artists and will represent the art collections of seven prominent female art collectors from London, Europe and North America.
15 leading artists produce posters to celebrate London Undergrounds 150th Anniversary.
9 May 2013 • Mark Westall
The posters will go up in June on prominent sites at four central London stations.
The 10 best … photographic self-portraits
24 March 2013 • Mark Westall
From Andy Warhol in drag and Giles Duley’s ‘broken statue’, to John Coplans’s back and Gillian Wearing as her father