Timothy Noble (born 1966) and Susan Webster (born 1967), are British artists who work as a collaborative duo. They are associated with the post-YBA generation of artists.[2]
Noble and Webster attended fine art foundation courses at Cheltenham Art College (now the University of Gloucestershire) and Leicester Polytechnic (now De Montfort University) respectively. The two first met in 1986 as Fine Art students at Nottingham Trent University, became good friends through shared interests, particularly their tastes in music.[3][4][5][6]
In 2007, they were awarded the prestigious Arken Prize,[11] and in 2009 they received Honorary Doctorates of Art from Nottingham Trent University, their former college, in acknowledgement of their artistic achievements to date.[12]
The artists are currently represented by BlainSouthern in London.
Work
Tim Noble and Sue Webster's work can be divided into the 'Light Works' and the 'Shadow Works', though Webster does not see them as completely separate. She says:
"We kept them both going side by side. There are two sides to the work; the shiny side and the dark side. That kind of reflects the two personalities within us."[13]
The influence of music on their art, particularly punk rock, has been of great importance to them since they began their earliest collaborations: Says Noble:
"I think anything that's a bit of a rocket up the arse, anything that kicks against the routine, against the mundane things that close down your mind, is a refreshing and good thing. Punk did that very successfully... it offered a direct and instant means of producing products or things."[14]
Adds Webster:
"When we make a piece of work we're constantly looking for something that will take our breath away because if it does that to us we've pushed it as far as it will go. We like to look at every different way of making it, it can be very simple or very complicated, but we don't feel satisfied until we've both given it a good going over."[15]
Sir Norman Rosenthal, the former Exhibitions Secretary of the Royal Academy, writes:
"At the most immediate and most important level, [Tim] Noble and [Sue] Webster's work symbolizes a pair of artists clearly besotted and totally in love with each other, artists who are only interested in picturing themselves: sometimes surrounded by detritus; other times by pastiches of contemporary neon advertising. An antiaesthetic of vulgarity rules on the surface of their work."[16]
Shadow sculptures
The Shadow Sculptures incorporate diverse materials including household rubbish, scrap metal and taxidermy animals. By shining light onto these assemblages they are transformed into highly accurate shadow profiles of the artists.[17][18]
Miss Understood & Mr Meanor, 1997
Discussing their shadow works, Webster commented: "Our work is incredibly unsocial. There has to be complete darkness because you need to give the light and then to take it away again."[19]
Their first shadow sculpture, 'Miss Understood and Mr Meanor', 1997 (right), came into existence through experimentation with the assemblage of personal items and domestic trash.[20] The silhouettes are formed by lights shining on mounds of rubbish, which includes broken sunglasses and pin badges for rock bands. In this particular work the artist's heads are severed and impaled on stakes.[20] The work was destroyed in the 2004 Momart warehouse fire, along with a number of other well-known works from the Saatchi Collection.[21][22]
Through their shadow sculptures they managed to fuse the abstract and the representational, a pursuit that consumed the likes of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon.[20] This became even more apparent with their second major shadow sculpture, 'Dirty White Trash (with Gulls)', 1998 (left), which expanded the innovations of 'Miss Understood and Mr Meanor'.[23] This work is composed of a new kind of self-portrait, sculpted out of six months' worth of the artists' rubbish; the remains of everything they needed to survive during the time it took to make the work. A single light source illuminates the pile of rubbish thus casting a portrait in shadow, which contrasts sharply with the materials used to create it; the artists leaning against each other, back to back, enjoying a glass of wine and a cigarette.[23]
"Dirty White Trash (with Gulls) is a confluence of beauty and filth, form and anti-form. It is a work of art made out of the process of its own conception, an embodiment of formalist logic. At the same time, it is a negation of everything that formalism stands for... The artist is at the center of the work. It is deliberately entertaining, and revels in its own theatricality."[20]
Another work, 'British Wildlife' was created after Noble's father died in 2000. Using his collection of taxidermy animals, it is an assemblage of forty-six birds, forty mammals, and two stuffed fish, including a whole swan and even the pet crow Noble kept as a child.[20] The shadow formed by this mass of animals fittingly depicts back to back busts of the artists in a pose of grief.[24]
In September 2000, they were invited to participate in 'Apocalypse', the Royal Academy's follow up to the infamous Sensation exhibition of 1997. For this they presented 'The Undesirables', which comprises a mountain of detritus collected from outside Tim and Sue's house with a shadow image of the artists hovering above.[25] The appearance of a huge pile of rubbish in one of the largest galleries within the Royal Academy was intentionally radical and shocking, created to challenge viewers' assumptions about art.[26]
In 2006, an exhibition of their work was held at the Freud Museum, entitled 'Polymorphous Perverse'.[27]'Black Narcissus', a sculpture made of black silicone casts of Webster's fingers and Noble's penis in various states of arousal, was placed in Sigmund Freud's study next to a bust of Freud himself. When illuminated the sculpture cast a double profile portrait of the artists, illustrating how sexuality influences our perception of reality reflecting the sexuality that Freud discovered at the core of human life. Another work, 'Scarlett', 2006 (see below video on 'External link') was a "worktable on which numerous bizarre mechanical toys are working and seemingly in the process of being made; a nightmarish setting of repressed sexual and sadomasochistic fantasies and transgressions."[28]
Light sculptures
The light sculptures, created in tandem with their shadow investigations, are constructed out of computer sequenced light-bulbs that perpetually flash, sending out messages of, often simultaneous, love and hate. The sculptures reference the iconic pop culture symbols of Britain and America, recalling carnival shows and signage typical of working-class sea-side Britain, Piccadilly Circus, Las Vegas and Times Square.[20]
Puny Undernourished Kid & Girlfriend From Hell, (Diptych) 2004
As with almost all of their work, many of the Light Sculptures are meant to be contradictory, and to produce conflicting feelings in the viewer. This is certainly the case with their early light sculpture, 'Toxic Schizophrenia', 1997. The relentlessly flashing heart with a knife stuck through it fuses a Christian emblem with a cliché rock 'n' roll tattoo. As with the shadow sculptures, duality lies at its core; the work represents romance and pain, love and hate, friendship and alienation, negative and positive.[16]
The same contradictions resonate at the centre of their later work, 'Sacrificial Heart', 2008, a three-dimensional rotating version of 'Toxic Schizophrenia', which, like the earlier work, is both repellent and strangely alluring.[29][30]'Toxic Schizophrenia (Hyper Version)' was their first permanent public sculpture, unveiled at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, May 2009.[31]
Contradictions and irony abound in the works exhibited at the Gagosian, Beverley Hills exhibition, 'Instant Gratification', 2001.[14] The twenty foot long revision of their original 1997 'Forever' is inextricably linked to the artist's earlier trips to Las Vegas, playing with the traditional connotations of the word, as the constantly flashing lights reinforce the idea of 'forever'.[20]
With 'A Pair of Dollars' they attempted to form an ironic response to the art market and art fairs, creating what Noble described as a 'vulgar' artwork, to demonstrate their annoyance with this system.[13] However, he has since acknowledged the failure of this irony, due to the huge success of the piece.[13]
'Puny Undernourished Kid & Girlfriend from Hell' (Puny Undernourished Kid shown left), represents another return to earlier work, as it derives from cartoon-like drawings that Noble and Webster had made of each other ten years before.[20] These large neon figures are covered with neon tattoos of aggressive and forceful statements, clearly demonstrating the influence of punk rock on the artists.[1]
Metal sculptures
'The Crack' (2004), is one in a series of welded metal sculptures which appear at first glance as abstract works in the tradition of David Smith and Anthony Caro, while they actually work to reverse this abstraction into figuration.[20]
'The Crack', a vertical column-like form, is possibly the most difficult of the artists' shadow works to decipher. Instead of focusing on the usual black silhouettes cast on the wall, the viewer must instead focus on the white space around the shadow, which reveals the naked bodies of the artists facing each other. This perceptual challenge brings to mind Ernst Gombrich's discussion of perception in his famous 1960 book, 'Art and Illusion'.[32] 'The Crack' displays at one moment an abstract shape that is perhaps reminiscent of a heroic mountain landscape by Clyfford Still, with its cracks and gullies; gradually we begin to perceive the full-length naked profiles of our friends approaching each other, nipples touching, as though they are about to make love again for the millionth time.[16]
The New Barbarians
The New Barbarians, 1997-9
In 1997, Tim Noble and Sue Webster commissioned a sculptor from Madame Tussauds to help them create a life-size sculpture of themselves as australopithecines. Called 'The New Barbarians' (left), the work is based upon a diorama at the American Museum of Natural History, New York, which shows a reconstruction of two early ancestors of the human species.[33] The artists produced a version of these figures overlaid with their own facial features. The sculptures are installed so that they stand in isolation in an apparently infinite space. Their hairlessness evokes conflicting connotations; they could be the first humans or the last – cave people, or the survivors of a nuclear holocaust.[20] Thus, the work continues the artist's concern with conflicting themes of impermanence and immortality. A year after beginning 'The New Barbarians' they made another version of the work, 'Masters of the Universe', 1998–2000. This uses the same sculptural model as the earlier work but is covered with hair.
Electric Fountain
The 35-foot tall 'Electric Fountain', constructed from steel, neon tubing and 3,390 LED bulbs, was exhibited at Rockefeller Plaza, New York, February 2008.[34] 'Electric Fountain' (see 'External links' below for video clip) represents the artist's take on the world's oldest form of public art, the fountain. Said Webster: "Electric Fountain mimics the tradition of a fountain as a monument found in public squares around the world, but its magic lies in the emulation of light where water should be." The fountain can be seen as both a celebration of contemporary culture and an ambiguous comment on the nature of consumer society, embodying themes that are often present in the duo's work.[1]
The Dirty House
In 2001, Tim Noble and Sue Webster bought a dilapidated early twentieth-century furniture factory in the East End of London, which would become their studio space. The artists commissioned David Adjaye to design the building, which he named 'The Dirty House', a reference to the medium they use in many of their works.[35] The original brickwork was painted a dark brown, offset by two rows of window openings, and a 'floating' roof that appears to hover over the upper level of glazing and recessed decks.[36]
In 2012, Sue purchased the Mole Man House in Hackney for $1.1 million. Previously owned by engineer William Lyttle, the house was greatly dilapidated when purchased including the roof having fallen in. Sue hired architect David Adaye who had worked on her previous house. The massive tunnel system had mostly been filled by the town council, but an enormous basement area was created for the art studio using some of the space Lyttle had tunneled out of the ground beneath the home. An enormous amount of rubble and trash had to be removed which equaled around 300 skips worth—one skip a day .[37][38]
Personal lives
Noble and Webster were married on 7 June 2008. The wedding party was held on board the Queen Elizabeth, the boat that was used for the Sex Pistols' infamous 'Jubilee party'; also held on the same day as the Pistols' party, 31 years later.[39] The service was conducted by their friend and fellow artist Tracey Emin.
It was announced on 4 January 2013, that after 20 years together, Noble and Webster were to divorce.[40]
Tracey Karima Emin is an English artist known for autobiographical and confessional artwork. She produces work in a variety of media including drawing, painting, sculpture, film, photography, neon text and sewn appliqué. Once the "enfant terrible" of the Young British Artists in the 1980s, Tracey Emin is now a Royal Academician.
Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist. He won the Turner Prize in 1996, the Premio 2000 at the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997 and the Hugo Boss Prize in 1998. He lives and works in Berlin, Germany.
Lucian Michael Freud was a British painter and draughtsman, specialising in figurative art, and is known as one of the foremost 20th-century English portraitists. He was born in Berlin, the son of Jewish architect Ernst L. Freud and the grandson of Sigmund Freud. Freud got his first name "Lucian" from his mother in memory of the ancient writer Lucian of Samosata. His family moved to England in 1933, when he was 10 years old, to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British naturalized citizen in 1939. From 1942 to 1943 he attended Goldsmiths' College, London. He served at sea with the British Merchant Navy during the Second World War.
Christopher Lee Burden was an American artist working in performance art, sculpture and installation art. Burden became known in the 1970s for his performance art works, including Shoot (1971), where he arranged for a friend to shoot him in the arm with a small-caliber rifle. A prolific artist, Burden created many well-known installations, public artworks and sculptures before his death in 2015.
Hiroshi Sugimoto is a Japanese photographer and architect. He leads the Tokyo-based architectural firm New Material Research Laboratory.
Jennifer Anne Saville is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists. Saville works and lives in Oxford, England and she is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art. Some paintings are of small dimensions, while other are of much larger scale. Monumental subjects come from pathology textbooks that she has studied that informed her on injury to bruise, burns, and deformity. John Gray commented: "As I see it, Jenny Saville's work expresses a parallel project of reclaiming the body from personality. Saville worked with many models who under went cosmetic surgery to reshape a portion of their body. In doing that, she captures "marks of personality for the flesh" and together embraces how we can be the writers of our own lives."
Sir Michael Craig-Martin is an Irish-born contemporary conceptual artist and painter. He is known for fostering and adopting the Young British Artists, many of whom he taught, and for his conceptual artwork, An Oak Tree. He is an Emeritus Professor of Fine Art at Goldsmiths. His memoir and advice for the aspiring artist, On Being An Artist, was published by London-based publisher Art / Books in April 2015.
Martin Kippenberger was a German artist known for his extremely prolific output in a wide range of styles and media, superfiction as well as his provocative, jocular and hard-drinking public persona.
Lucio Fontana was an Argentine-Italian painter, sculptor and theorist. He is mostly known as the founder of Spatialism.
Francesco Clemente is an Italian contemporary artist. He has lived at various times in Italy, India and New York City. Some of his work is influenced by the traditional art and culture of India. He has worked in various artistic media including drawing, fresco, graphics, mosaic, oils and sculpture. He was among the principal figures in the Italian Transavanguardia movement of the 1980s, which was characterised by a rejection of Formalism and conceptual art and a return to figurative art and Symbolism.
Albert Oehlen is a German artist. He lives and works in Bühler, Switzerland and Segovia, Spain.
The Gagosian Gallery is a contemporary art gallery owned and directed by Larry Gagosian. The gallery exhibits some of the most influential artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are 18 gallery spaces – six in New York City, two in London, three in Paris, and one each in Basel, Gstaad, Beverly Hills, Rome, Athens, Geneva and Hong Kong.
Caledonia Curry, whose work appears under the name Swoon, is an American contemporary artist who works with printmaking, sculpture, and stop-motion animation to create immersive installations, community-based projects and public artworks. She is best known as one of the first women Street Artists to gain international recognition. Her work centers the transformative capacity of art as a catalyst for healing within communities experiencing crisis.
Urs Fischer is a Swiss-born contemporary visual artist living in New York City and Los Angeles. Fischer’s practice includes sculpture, installation, photography, and digitally-mediated images.
Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali was a Greek American artist who worked in a wide variety of media. An American art pioneer in light art and luminist sculpture, known for her neon, steel, aluminum and acrylic glass installations, she always used the mononym Chryssa professionally. She worked from the mid-1950s in New York City studios and worked since 1992 in the studio she established in Neos Kosmos, Athens, Greece.
Jeffrey Lynn Koons is an American artist recognized for his work dealing with popular culture and his sculptures depicting everyday objects, including balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces. He lives and works in both New York City and his hometown of York, Pennsylvania. His works have sold for substantial sums, including at least two record auction prices for a work by a living artist: US$58.4 million for Balloon Dog (Orange) in 2013 and US$91.1 million for Rabbit in 2019.
Franz West was an Austrian artist.
Blain|Southern was a contemporary art gallery with branches in London, Berlin and New York. It was started in September 2010 by Harry Blain and Graham Southern, who had sold their previous gallery, Haunch of Venison, to Christie's. The gallery was originally at 21 Dering Street, but moved to 4 Hanover Square, London W1, in October 2012.
Rachel Feinstein is an American artist who specializes in sculpture. She is best known for baroque, fantasy-inspired sculptures like "The Snow Queen", which was drawn from a Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale. There have been over two dozen group and solo showings of her work in the United States, Europe and Asia. She is married to painter John Currin. In 2011 the New York Times described them as "the ruling power couple in today's art world."
Evan Gruzis is a contemporary artist born in 1979 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, United States. He has lived and worked in Los Angeles and New York City, and, since 2012, has lived in Wisconsin with his partner, Nicole Rogers, and their child. Gruzis first became known for his vivid paintings, which have been described as "extremely flat sculptures." His work also includes elaborate installations as well as collaborations which blur the lines of curation and production. In addition to his artistic practice, Gruzis owns and operates The Heights, a collaborative restaurant in Madison, Wisconsin, and teaches painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
References
1 2 3 Holzwarth, Hans W. (2009). 100 Contemporary Artists A-Z (Taschen's 25th anniversary specialed.). Köln: Taschen. pp.428–433. ISBN978-3-8365-1490-3.
↑ Archived 9 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine Trashed: A Post-YBA Couple's Collaborative Shadow Play. Village Voice, 18 November 2003
1 2 Tim Noble; Sue Webster (5 December 2006). Wasted Youth. Rizzoli. ISBN978-0-8478-2816-6. Jeffrey Deitch Projects website
↑ Isabella Blow graces the National Portrait Gallery– in the form of magpies, crows, a rattlesnake and a rat. Portrait of late fashion muse Isabella Blow uses stuffed animals to celebrate her 'gothic' image. Guardian, September 2010
This page is based on this Wikipedia article Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.
