Stephen Willats - Victoria Miro

Born 1943 in London, UK. Lives and works in London, UK

Since the early 1960s, Stephen Willats has situated his pioneering practice at the intersection between art and other disciplines such as cybernetics, advertising systems research, learning theory, communications theory and computer technology. In so doing, he has constructed and developed a collaborative, interactive and participatory practice grounded in the variables of social relationships, settings and physical realities.

Willats creates multi-sensory, multi-dimensional environments to encourage viewers to engage with their own creative and cognitive processes. Using the fabric of society – the everyday – as a site of investigation, his work presents a vehicle of exchange through which viewers can re-examine and transform the way they perceive the fabric of existing reality.

For six decades, Willats has concentrated on ideas that today are ever-present in contemporary art: communication, social engagement, active spectatorship, and self-organisation, and has initiated many seminal multi-media art projects everywhere from tennis clubs and public galleries to inner city housing estates. Outside of the norms and conventions of an object-based art world, Willats has developed work which reacts against what he sees as the historical determinism within art. Rather than presenting visitors with icons of certainty he creates a random, complex environment which stimulates visitors to engage in their own creative process rather than merely submitting to passive observation.

Importantly, Willats represents particular individual relations in a generalised form, affirming that it is useful to consider social situations on both a universal and a personal level. Observations of the macro- and micro-scale, of the generic and the specific, and of engagement and distance in Willats' work serve to problematise and present various points of entry into contemporary social relationships, thereby providing a vision of how they could be community centred.

About the Artist

Stephen Willats was born in 1943 in London, where he continues to live and work.

Recent solo institutional exhibitions include The Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs, Nottingham Trent University (2022); Languages of Dissent at Migros Museum, Zürich (2019). His work has also recently been featured in Coded: Art Enters the Computer Age, 1952 – 1982, Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2023); Light Works from the Tate Collection, Museum of Art Pudong, Shanghai, China; Rhythm and Geometry, Constructivist Art in Britain since 1951, Sainsbury Centre, Norwich (2021); Not Working – Artistic Production and Social Class, Kunstverein, Munich; What If … on Utopia in Art, Architecture and Design, Neues Museum, Nuremberg; Objects of Wonder: From Pedestal to Interaction, Aarhus Kunstmuseum, Denmark; Bodies – Cities: Collections and Excursions, Museum der Moderne, Salzburg (2020); Chicago Architecture Biennial (2019–20), Still Undead: Popular Culture in Britain Beyond the Bauhaus at Nottingham Contemporary (2019–20), Pushing Paper: Contemporary Drawing from 1970 to Now at the British Museum (2019–20), Objects of Wonder, British Sculpture 1950s–Present, featuring works from the Tate collection, at the PalaisPopulaire, Berlin (2019).

Previous solo exhibitions held at international institutions include Control, Tate Liverpool (2018); HUMAN RIGHT, mima, Middlesbrough (2017); THISWAY, INDEX, Stockholm (2016); Man from the 21st Century, Museo Tamayo Arte Contemporáneo, Mexico City (2014–15); Concerning our Present Way of Living, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2014); Control: Work 1962-69, Raven Row, London (2014); Conscious – Unconscious, In and Out the Reality Check, Modern Art Oxford, Oxford (2013); Stephen Willats: Surfing with the Attractor, South London Gallery, London (2012); COUNTERCONSCIOUSNESS, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe, Germany (2010); Assumptions and Presumptions, Art on the Underground, London (2007); From my Mind to Your Mind, Milton Keynes Gallery, (2007); How the World is and How it could be, Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen (2006); Changing Everything, South London Art Gallery, (1998); Buildings & People, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, (1993); Meta Filter and Related Works, Tate Gallery London, (1982); Concerning Our Present Way of Living, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, (1980); 4 Inseln, in Berlin, National Gallery, Berlin, (1980); Concerning our Present Way of Living, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, (1979).