Maureen Paley, London
Wearing has abandoned the video art that won her the Turner prize and taken up watercolours and oils to create a soul-baring investigation of the human condition
A face wearing a mask over mouth and nose greets you as you enter Gillian Wearing’s exhibition Lockdown. It is like all the masked faces you pass at stations or in the supermarket, but the eyes are empty holes, and underneath the face covering is a second mask, lifelike and made of smooth latex. The outer mask is easy to remove: you take it off and feel like yourself again. It is a lot harder to remove the mask that is your face. But in the quiet and loneliness of lockdown earlier this year, Wearing set out to peel off all the layers and see herself inside herself, a woman without a mask.
This surreal sculpture is the only new work in this show that looks like a “Wearing”. The Turner prize winner is famous for videos and photographs. The first mask she strips off here is her official artistic identity as someone who works with a camera. She comes before us naked, as she might have looked in her first year at art school: not a famous conceptual artist, just a sincere nobody who likes to draw and paint.
