Tim Head

Timed to coincide with the comprehensive survey of his work at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, the exhibition presents a series of bubble-jet and laser prints. These prints relate and complement the ink-jet pictures, ‘Thirteen Most Wanted’ shown at the Whitechapel.

Head’s use of the bubble jet printer is demonstrative of the engagement with mechanical processes which has been typical of his work for some time. In particular, the imprinted quality of a photocopied image appealed to him as more direct and more ‘contaminated’ than that created in a photograph. For Thirteen Most Wanted, Head drew on a bank of images, particularly the shapes used in packaging and presentation such as manufactured objects, labels and printed matter, sometimes redrawing and photocopying them. The selection was gradually refined to eliminate the more immediately recognisable forms, resulting in a group of generic motifs which seem at once familiar and ambiguous. As in much of Head’s work, the organic and inorganic seem to have been fused into an unnerving hybrid form.

Tim Head studied at the University of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (under Richard Hamilton) and at St Martins School of Art. He has been teaching at the Slade School of Art, University College since 1976. Tim Head had his first one-person exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford in 1972 and represented Britain in the 1980 Venice Biennale. Since then he has been represented in various group shows in Britain and abroad, most recently ‘Seven Obsesssions’ at the Whitechapel and ‘Objects for the Ideal Home – the Legacy of Pop Art’ at the Serpentine Gallery, London. In 1994 he will be having a major exhibition at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin.