Jane & Louise Wilson (b. 1967)
Urville
C-print face-mounted to Plexiglas mounted on dibond
70⅞ x 70⅞in. (180 x 180cm.)
Executed in 2006, this work is number two from an edition of four
Another from the edition is held in the collection of Tate, London.

PROVENANCE

Haunch of Venison, London.

EXHIBITED

Zurich, Haunch of Venison, Jane & Louise Wilson, 2006 (installation views illustrated in colour, pp. 11-12, 15; illustrated, p. 22).
Walsall, The New Art Gallery, Jane & Louise Wilson, 2007-2008.
Lisbon, Centro de Arte Moderna - CAM - Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian, Jane & Louise Wilson. Suspending Time, 2010-2011 (illustrated, p. 101). This exhibition later travelled to Santiago de Compostela, Centro Galego de Arte Contemporánea.
London, Tate Britain, Ruin Lust, 2013 (another from the edition exhibited).
London, Tate Modern, Conflict-Time-Photography, 2014-2015 (another from the edition illustrated, p. 163).This exhibition later travelled to Essen, Museum Folkwang and Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen.

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SPECIALIST NOTES

Jane and Louise Wilson’s excavation of the psychology of architectural space is unparalleled in its sensitivity. The twin sisters’ attentiveness to the subtle interlocution between the formal, social, technological and political history of buildings, structures and charged spaces gives rise to a remarkable poetics in their work. Working in film, sculpture, installation and photography, the Wilsons have created a body of work that uniquely interrogates the residue of individual and collective memory. The poignancy of their work frequently derives from the absence of the figure with the effect invariably that it is then through the negative presence of the body that the work is activated. This echo of human activity that has been erased by the creep of history lends the works a haunting quality that is reinforced by the overwhelming scale of the images. The intimacy that their photographs and films bring to subjects that might normally be considered impersonal in their monumentality allows the work to recover the origins and original functions of structures that are so often abstracted by the passage of time. As a result, many of their most ambitious and celebrated projects have mined the eerie forgotten spaces that society at large tends, or rather wishes, to forget. In recent years they have taken the Nazi sea defenses on the beaches of Normandy, the abandoned offices of East Germany’s secret police and the abandoned city of Pripyat, near Chernobyl, as their subjects.

Urville, Landes and Casemate SK667 belong to a series of works that document German sea defenses on the Normandy coast. They were executed in 2006 and a selection of works from the series was exhibited at the New Art Gallery Walsall in 2007 -2008 and the Centro de Arte Moderna, Portugal, in 2010. An edition of Urville, along with two other works from the series, was subsequently purchased by Tate and has recently been exhibited in Ruin Lust at Tate Britain in 2013 and Conflict, Time, Photography at Tate Modern in 2014.

Jane Wilson and Louise Wilson were born in Newcastle in 1967. They began working together in 1989 and have exhibited at major international institutions and biennials. They were short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1999. In 2015 Jane and Louise Wilson have participated in History Is Now: 7 Artists Take on Britain at the Hayward Gallery and premiered Undead Sun, a major new installation, at the Imperial War Museum.

Urville 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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