Richard Wilson is one of the foremost exponents of installation art working in the world today. His seminal work 20:50, a sea of reflective sump oil permanently installed in the Saatchi Collection, London, has been described as "one of the masterpieces of the twentieth century." More recent pieces that have generated universal critical acclaim include Slice of Reality, a 70-foot high vertical cross-section of a 600-ton dredger located in the Thames next to the Millennium Dome in London, and Set North for Japan, a full-scale steel framework replica of the artist's own house, displaced and inverted in the Japanese countryside. This, the first monograph on the artist, examines the full spectrum of his work, moving from models, drawings, and his many gallery-based projects to collaborations with architects and engineers to realize such major architectural interventions as Over Easy, a 25-foot, imperceptibly rotating, disc-shaped section of a building's fa?ade that challenges our collective expectation and experience of how space and materials should behave. Richard Wilson includes more than fifty pieces made over the past twenty years, as well as a comprehensive checklist that also includes earlier projects from the 1970s, offering a long overdue survey of the work of one of the most important artists of modern times.
Yet Wilson found his vocation as a landscape artist during an extended visit to Italy (1750-1758). Indeed, he can be considered the virtual founder of a native British landscape school. While in Italy, Wilson devoted himself to the painting of idealized landscapes with imaginary classical ruins, bathed in poetry, in the manner of Claude Lorrain. and Nicolas Poussin. Our painting, with its bucolic foreground depicting cattle watering, and its impressionistic ruins in the middle ground, would seem to belong to this period.Although Italian landscapes were hugely in vogue, Wilson and Gainsborough, among others, could not earn a living painting them, as they themselves were not Italian. Thus upon returning home, Wilson continued to paint Italianate landscapes, but used the scenery of England and Wales and fine views of country homes, for which he received many commissions, as the subjects of his paintings.
