Sam Taylor-Wood
Sam Taylor-Wood
8 October 2006 – 28 January 2007
Principal Sponsor: 
A focused survey of portraiture and self-portraiture by one of the UK’s leading contemporary artists. This poetic and challenging exhibition features ‘Crying Men’ (2002-2004), twenty-seven photographs of leading male actors in a state of intense emotional vulnerability. While we are used to seeing these performers emote ‘fictionally’ on the large and small screen—here we are presented with a sequence of evocative black & white and colour images where the ‘truth’ of their distress is more ambiguous. The actors include Willem Dafoe, Laurence Fishburne, Paul Newman, Sam Shepherd, Jude Law, and Forest Whitaker. Joining this cycle are self-portraits from 2000-2001, the moving sequence of images Falling I-IV (2003) depicting figures tumbling mid-air in ornate Baroque interiors, plus a number of key film and video works; Brontosaurus (1995), Ascension and Strings both from 2003 and the much-discussed David (2004), which is a single take of footballer David Beckham sleeping for its 1 hour, 7 minute duration. Sam Taylor-Wood was born in London in 1967. She graduated from Goldsmith’s College, London in 1990 and emerged as one of a group of artists that became known as the YBA’s (Young British Artists – including Damian Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin, Cornelia Parker).
Sam Taylor-Wood’s work in photography and film is distinguished by an ironic and subversive use of the media, which centre on the creation of enigmatic situations, charged with a latent but explosive energy. She depicts people both in and out of the public eye in compositions that fuse religious imagery informed by Renaissance and Baroque painting and the secular, urban and contemporary landscape that she inhabits.
Sam Taylor-Wood has exhibited extensively since the early 1990s with recent highlights being solo exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery, London (2002), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2002), BAWAG Foundation, Vienna (2003), National Portrait Gallery, London (2004), State Russian Museum, St. Petersburg & Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (both 2004). She was short-listed for The Turner Prize in 1998 and has participated in numerous international Biennale and group exhibitions. She is represented by White Cube, London; Donald Young Gallery, Chicago; and Matthew Marks Gallery, New York.
Exhibition initiated and organised by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney and toured to New Zealand in partnership with City Gallery Wellington.