Stephen willats biography

Stephen Willats (born 1943 in London) is a.
Stephen Willats (born 1943 in London) is a British artist.
' Born in London in 1943, Stephen Willats was one of the very few serious representatives of international Concept Art in England during the 1960s and 1970s.

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Stephen Willats

British artist

Stephen Willats (born 1943 in London) is a British artist. He lives and works in London.

Stephen Willats is a pioneer of conceptual art.^[1] Since the early 1960s he has created work concerned with extending the territory in which art functions. His work has involved interdisciplinary processes and theory from sociology, systems analysis, cybernetics, semiotics and philosophy.

Works

His multi-media projects often engage visitors to participate in creative social processes. Notable projects include Multiple Clothing (1965–1998), The West London Social Resource Project (1972), and the book Art and Social Function: Three Projects (1976). Willats considers Art and Social Function as a "kind of manual or tool that would be relevant to any artist thinking of enacting different paradigms for an art intervening in the fabric of society".

His 1973 work Meta Filter consisted of pairs of participants seated at a computer, attempting to reach an agreement about the meanings of various images and statements.^[2]

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A brush with… Stephen Willats

An in-depth conversation with the British artist Stephen Willats, one of the leading figures in conceptual art in Britain, who addresses societal issues while exploring the meanings and purposes of art in the wider world.

Since the 1960s, Willats (born in London in 1943) has foregrounded ideas that have become more widespread in contemporary art today, including empowering the viewer as a participant, emphasising the role of community in forging his work, and collaborating with his subjects so that they are effectively co-authors. From the very start of his career, Willats eschewed what he has called the “norms and conventions of an object-based art world” and instead attempted to subvert what he views as “a deterministic culture of objects and monuments”.

For him, art has a complex, interactive and dynamic social function. He discusses his interest in thinking related to theories of learning and communication, early forms of artificial intelligence, advertising theory, and cybernetics. He reflects on how working in a gallery as a teenager ga

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A pioneering British conceptual artist, Willats (1943, London) has had a long association with Austria, having exhibited at Belvedere 21 (2019), Generali Foundation (2009), Kunsthaus Graz (2007), Grazer Kunstverein (1999) and Secession (1981) as well as featuring in Matteo Lucchetti’s Curated By exhibition Sleeping Producers at Charim in 2014.

Willats’ work charts a period in human history in which computer systems have been used to inform and determine an understanding of collective consciousness and the public conscience. From the outset of his career in the 1960s, Willats applied aspects of cybernetics and social theory to specific contexts, seeking a new visual language to articulate and reinvent the emergent systems of contemporary life. The artist’s specific interest in temporal progressions and personal transformations as feedback systems within a social environment have been a recurrent site of exploration in his practice and are central to themes explored in Transition Transform, his first solo exhibition at Charim in June-July 2024.

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