Keith Tyson

Drawings and Paintings

3 February – 2 April 2022

New York, 22nd Street

For over thirty years, Turner Prize-winning British artist Keith Tyson has used a variety of methods and materials to explore our reality and art’s role in representing it. Hauser & Wirth presents new drawings and paintings from two of Tyson’s extensive and ongoing series, with works spanning both ground floor galleries of the 22nd Street location.

Explore the exhibition

Tyson’s still life paintings bring together disparate styles and techniques, concepts and ideas. The genre has become a place from which the artist, who eschews the notion of a signature style, is able to launch infinite painterly explorations.

The first room includes Tyson’s latest large-scale flower paintings, made mostly during social isolation. Each canvas is rendered in a different aesthetic style, with Tyson reimagining the floral still life genre through varying scientific, mathematical, and art-historical frameworks.

The second room of the exhibition is devoted to the newest iterations of Tyson’s Studio Wall Drawing series, initiated in 1997. Painted on identically sized sheets of paper and displayed together in a grid-like formation, these works occupy the same overall proportions as one of the walls in the artist’s first studio. Shown together, his drawings form a poetic record of passing time, as a group they exist somewhere between a sketchbook, a journal, a poem, and a painting.

While the floral still lives are an exercise in material chaos and control, Tyson’s Studio Wall Drawings series is akin to a visual database, a record of the artist’s daily mediations on the passing of time and the complexity of human existence. The largest of the five works on view from this series is ‘Two Decades in Time and Space’ (2000 – 2020), which consists of 42 individual works on paper, made over the last 20 years, curated together with no obvious chronological or thematic order. Together, they represent a patchwork of the inner and outer worlds we all carry with us and speak to the idea that time is configured through our individual personal experiences and a larger cultural context.

On view in New York

Keith Tyson. Drawings and Paintings is on view now through 2 Apr 2022 at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd street.

About the Artist

Keith Tyson

‘I don’t believe in a permanent self or in developing an artistic style. Our world is full of intricately connected systems and events. I’m simply trying to make work in collaboration with them.’

Drawing on a wide range of influences ranging from mathematics and science through to poetry and mythology, Keith Tyson has become known for a highly diverse body of work including drawing, painting, installation and sculpture.  He is interested in how art emerges from the combination of information systems and physical processes that surround us everyday. Through such diverse explorations the artist seeks to locate us in space and time and reflect the complexity of the world we all inhabit.

Tyson sees paint as a programmable material, effected by various social and aesthetic influences. He uses them to cross pollinate text, pictorial language, mathematics, and myths in his paintings. Although he often works in a rule based series, he states that his aim is always that each individual work will eventually become its own universe, with its own rules, beauty and reasons for being.

Computers, coding and maths have always been an inextricable element of Tyson’s life. From taking apart a motherboard as a teenager, to building ‘Art Machine’ early in the 1990’s. The ‘Art Machine’ created algorithm-generated combinations of words and ideas, which Tyson then had to interpret and realise as physical artworks. In his varied approaches to his working, Tyson questions the creation of the artwork itself, positing it as something which can equally be formed by an iterative function, as it can by the artist's will and inner emotional landscape.

Inquire about available works by Keith Tyson

‘Keith Tyson. Drawings and Paintings’ is on view now through 2 April 2022 at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd Street.

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