Sam Taylor-Wood
(March 4, 1967 - ) |
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Art Work
| Name: |
Sam Taylor-Wood |
| Gender: |
Male |
| Place of Birth: |
London, United Kingdom |
| Nationality: |
English |
| Birth: |
March 4, 1967 |
| Death: |
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| Website: |
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| Past Auctions: |
Click Here |
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Quick Facts
| Known For: |
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| Medium: |
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| Method: |
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| Style: |
Conceptualism, Young British Artists movement |
| Fine Art Profession(s): |
Photography
Filmmaker
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Biography
Looking up at Selfridges department store, on London's Oxford Street, in the summer of 2000, you noticed that its facade had completely changed. Wrapping six storeys of the building like a ribbon around a cake was a 900 x 60 foot frieze, XV Seconds, by Sam Taylor Wood. The work was a pastiche of one of the greatest relics of classical civilization, the Elgin Marbles. Replacing the ancient deities were what the artist called 'modem-day gods', celebrities, disporting themselves in a palatial interior. XV Seconds was impressive in scale, but its slick appropriation of a famous artwork and starry cast made it appear no more than advertising, all glitz and gloss, nothing lasting.
Taylor Wood, who trained at Goldsmiths College, uses film as well as photographs (and. in early pieces, video). She brings a kind of magpie approach to the world around her, raiding a wide range of culture, from Andy Warhol to Abel Ferrara's 1992 film Bad Lieutenant. In the series Soliloquy (1998), Taylor Wood borrowed from art history to rework the format of the altarpiece, and drew on other artists including Velazquez, whose Rokeby Venus she re-worked in a modem interior.
Perhaps Taylor Wood's most successful works are her video and film pieces. Brontosaurus (1995) draws crowds at Tate Modern. We watch a naked man frantically dancing in a cramped domestic setting, a scene teetering between funny and awkward. And in Travesty of a Mockery (1995), a couple in furious argument are literally divided, separated onto two gallery walls. The woman is an actor, the man merely reacting. It is a painful portrayal of the games people play and the scripts they act out in personal relationships. In her self-portraits, Taylor Wood takes off from the earlier work of Bruce Nauman. In relation to her female contemporaries, her images of self can sometimes be located between Tracey Emin's sexually excessive persona, and the in-your-face attitude of Sarah Lucas. In the photograph Slut {1993), Taylor Wood pictured herself laughing, a ring of love bites around her neck. She was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1998. |
Samples of Work
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