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Keith Tyson

Keith Tyson

Turn Back Now

We are delighted to launch our 2017 programme with Turn Back Now, an exhibition of Studio Wall Drawings by 2002 Turner Prize Winner, Keith Tyson, which will cover the entire ground floor of the gallery.

Tyson explores some of the most fundamental preoccupations of our shared human experience in his work, taking the universe and our place in it as his subject. His rich artistic practice, encompassing painting, sculpture, drawing, machines and systems, all share a fascination with infinity, the nature of being, and the origins of life.

The Studio Wall Drawings map Tyson’s experience of daily existence, as a space to consider universal questions, and to record deeply personal moments, charting, in Tyson’s words, ‘a kind of emotional headline of the day.’ 

Tyson began making Studio Wall Drawings in 1997 as a way to explore ideas in a very limited studio space. They existed, in his words, ‘somewhere in-between a sketchbook, a journal, a poem and a painting’. Twenty years later they are still a fundamental part of his artistic practice.

Keith Tyson was born in Ulverston, Cumbria. He left school at 15 and worked as a shipyard apprentice, building Trident nuclear submarines.  In 1989 he enrolled onto the Art Foundation course at Carlisle College, and completed a degree in Alternative Practice at Brighton University in 1993.  In 1996 he received the ICA Arts & Innovation Award, and in 2002 won the Turner Prize.  

His work has been exhibited at The Centre Pompidou, Whitney Museum, Royal Academy, Tate Modern, the ICA and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and is held in collections around the world, including the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, Arts Council, London, MOMA, New York, and Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art.  He lives and works in Sussex.

Portrait of Keith Tyson, in his studio © Pete Jones