British contemporary artist Mat Collishaw explores the language of image making to examine the tensions between representation, perception, and reality inherent to the interpretation of visual media including photography and video.
Read MoreCollishaw gained a BFA from Goldsmiths in London in 1989, where he studied alongside the group of students who would later come to be known as the Young British Artists (YBAs).
Collishaw works across photography, video, sound, and sculpture, often combining media in immersive, multi-part installations to build layered narratives. He has explored a vast range of themes over his career, including the grotesque, abject, libidinal, or ecological. Collishaw may subvert the viewer's initial visceral response by pitting formal beauty against confronting subject matter, exploiting the shock value of his work to comment on the transformative or illusory power of the image.
In 1988 while still a student, Collishaw participated in Freeze, the pivotal group exhibition organised by his peer Damien Hirst which featured many of the YBAs. Collishaw gained widespread attention for his work Bullet Hole (1988), a close-up image of a graphic head wound, enlarged and lit up across fifteen light boxes on a monumental scale. Despite its title, the photograph—appropriated from a medical textbook—actually depicted an ice pick wound. Contrasting the allure of modern image presentation against graphic material, Bullet Hole was one of the artist's earliest explorations of trickery and dissonance.
Collishaw's photographs often play with elements such as scale, resolution, and beauty, and may reference existing images, historic paintings, or narratives. In the black and white self-portrait photograph Narcissus (1990), a shirtless Collishaw is seen reclining on the muddy ground and gazing into a pool of dirty water in a dilapidated urban setting, in reference to the figure from Greek mythology.
For the series 'Last Meal on Death Row' (2010), Collishaw composed a highly staged series of C-type still lifes, each capturing the last meals of death row prisoners. James Russell (2010) presents a single apple centered in the composition, while William Joseph Kitchens (2010) depicts a spread of fried eggs, bread, milk, and juice. Dimly lit against dark backgrounds and de-saturated of colour, the 'Last Meal' photographs offered a contemporary interpretation of the memento mori or vanitas genre.
Collishaw has also explored representations of nature and organisms through photographs and multimedia installations. Commissioned for the Victoria and Albert Museum's octagonal cupola, Magic Lantern (2010) was a large-scale, three-dimensional zoetrope that mimicked the movement of moths flying, lit up so as to appear like a lantern when viewed from outside of the cupola.
Similarly, The Centrifugal Soul (2016) comprised a kinetic device based on the Victorian zoetrope that used strobe lights and motion to create the illusion of animated exotic birds and flowers. Tausif Noor wrote for Artforum: 'Mat Collishaw considers how sexual desire is rooted largely in subterfuge. Drawing on the evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller's theory that consumerism is an extension of the need to attract sexual partners, Collishaw takes a macabre approach to the illusionistic activities of the natural world.'
Collishaw has presented in solo and group exhibitions internationally since the 1990s.
Select solo exhibitions include The Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, St Nicholas' Church Korenmarkt, Ghent (2020); Djanogly Gallery, Lakeside Arts, Nottingham (2020); The End of Innocence, Fundació Sorigué, Lleida (2019); The Nerve Rack, Ushaw College, Durham (2019); Dialogues, Villanueva Pavilion, Real Jardín Botánico, Madrid (2019).
Select group exhibitions include London Calling: British Art Today, From David Hockney to Idris Khan, Fundación Bancaja, Valencia (2021); UnNatural History, The Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, Coventry (2021); Fairy Round, Tate Britain, London (2020); Deep State of Rapture, Page Gallery, Seoul (2019).
Collishaw's works are held in major international public collections including the Centre Pompidou; Art Gallery of New South Wales; National Galleries of Scotland; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Tate; among others.
Mat Collishaw's website can be found here, and his Instagram can be found here.
Misong Kim | Ocula | 2022
