Keith Tyson (b. 1969)
That Which Is and Might Have Been Geno/Pheno Painting
acrylic on aluminium in artist's frame, in two parts
each: 33½ x 24⅝in. (85.2 x 62.5cm.)
Executed in 2004

PROVENANCE

Tony Studley Collection.
Haunch of Venison, London.

EXHIBITED

London, Haunch of Venison, Keith Tyson: Geno Pheno, 2004-2005, no. 64 (illustrated in colour, pp. 64-65). This exhibition later travelled to New York, Pace Gallery.

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SPECIALIST NOTES

Winner of the Turner Prize in 2002, Keith Tyson grew up amidst the bountiful natural beauty of the Lake District. He carries the spirit of his Cumbrian youth into his paintings, where he continues to explore the wonders and complexity of nature, metaphysics and human existence. Tyson’s fascination with nature and the process of generation – of how things come to be – is manifested in his artworks and series. Tyson welds together elements that otherwise stand apart in the contemporary world - science and art, philosophy and nature – and opens the mind to the myriad of possibilities that could be found in their combinations and juxtapositions.

In the Geno/Pheno series, Tyson explores the theme of causality with the ideas of genotype and phenotype. In genetics, a genotype is the generative system that encodes for one of possibly many outcomes. Though derived from the same generative system, these outcomes, or phenotypes, are each distinctly unique. Drawing from this fundamental coding methodology from which nature occurs, Tyson creates a pairing of two elements with one assuming the role of a genotype, and the other of a phenotype. In this series, Tyson has created eighteen sculptures and twenty-seven paintings. Each of these works consists of two complementary units that stand side by side: on the left lies the Genotype, the generative system that encodes for the Phenotype that stands to its right. 'That Which Is And Might Have Been’is a diptych painting in the series. The panel on the left illustrates the Genotype, a generative system which Tyson has designed that has the potential to produce a myriad of possible expressions. Painted on the right is a Phenotype, which is just one of the many possibilities that could result from the Genotype on the left. The Geno/Pheno series highlights the artist’s enduring fascination with the origins of matter and the endless possibilities generated by chance.

That Which Is and Might Have Been Geno/Pheno Painting is one of our sale specialist, Amanda Lo Iacono’s, sale highlights. Read more about this piece and her other picks here.

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