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“I think the most powerful aspect of Cathy’s approach to art-making is that there’s so many subtleties, and so many layers, but very little is given away. So all of those things are possibilities, but none of them are certainties.” —Dr. Zoé Whitley
Kudos to the British Council which is featuring a woman artist for the third Venice Biennale in a row. That’s a good start. For this 58th edition of the Biennale, they have selected the Northern Ireland-born, Glasgow-based artist Cathy Wilkes (b. 1966), to have a solo exhibition of new works, curated by Zoé Whitley – running May 11 through November 24, 2019. “Her work recalls inchoate visions of interiors and places of loss,” says the British Council, “and meditates on the nature of love and the coexistence of life and death.”
Whitley was a curator of the acclaimed Soul of a Nation exhibition, and earlier this year was appointed senior curator at The Hayward Gallery in London. Whitley is the first open-call curator to be selected by the British Council to work alongside the artist on a British Pavilion exhibition, presenting a significant international opportunity for mid-career curators.
In this video from the British Council, Whitley walks us through the British Pavilion and talks about the power of Wilkes’ unsettling work and the layers of ambiguous meaning that pervade her installation.
