Gillian Wearing

This monograph provides an overview of the artist’s work from the early, iconic photographs of people holding up signs with written personal confessions or thoughts – entitled Signs That Say What You Want Them to Say and Not Signs That Say What Someone Else Wants You to Say (1992–93) – to her latest video Bully (2010) in which the roles of victims and perpetrators, actors and directors are blurred. The publication accompanies a major international survey of the artist’s work at Whitechapel Gallery, London; K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf; and Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich; which includes new photographic works, two portraits from her ongoing series of iconic photographers and still lives of flowers that are inspired by the rich symbolism of seventeenth-century Dutch painting. 100 full-colour illustrations and never-before-published archival material are accompanied by new texts by the exhibition’s curators, Daniel F. Herrmann, Doris Krystof and Bernhart Schwenk.