New York, 22nd Street

Tyson’s still life paintings bring together disparate styles and techniques, concepts and ideas. The genre has become a place from which the artist, who eschews the notion of a signature style, is able to launch infinite painterly explorations.

The first room includes Tyson’s latest large-scale flower paintings, made mostly during social isolation. Each canvas is rendered in a different aesthetic style, with Tyson reimagining the floral still life genre through varying scientific, mathematical, and art-historical frameworks.

The second room of the exhibition is devoted to the newest iterations of Tyson’s Studio Wall Drawing series, initiated in 1997. Painted on identically sized sheets of paper and displayed together in a grid-like formation, these works occupy the same overall proportions as one of the walls in the artist’s first studio. Shown together, his drawings form a poetic record of passing time, as a group they exist somewhere between a sketchbook, a journal, a poem, and a painting.

While the floral still lives are an exercise in material chaos and control, Tyson’s Studio Wall Drawings series is akin to a visual database, a record of the artist’s daily mediations on the passing of time and the complexity of human existence. The largest of the five works on view from this series is ‘Two Decades in Time and Space’ (2000 – 2020), which consists of 42 individual works on paper, made over the last 20 years, curated together with no obvious chronological or thematic order. Together, they represent a patchwork of the inner and outer worlds we all carry with us and speak to the idea that time is configured through our individual personal experiences and a larger cultural context.

Keith Tyson was born in 1969 in Ulverston, UK, and lives and works between Oxfordshire and London, UK. Tyson attended the Carlisle College of Art, UK, and received his MA in Alternative Practice from the University of Brighton, UK in 1993. Tyson became the 18th recipient of the Turner Prize in 2002. His work is held in the collections of the Tate Gallery, London, UK; Los Angeles Contemporary Museum of Art, Los Angeles CA; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; and the South London Gallery Collection, London, UK, amongst others.

‘Keith Tyson. Drawings and Paintings’ is on view now through 2 Apr 2022 at Hauser & Wirth New York, 22nd street.