Published on the occasion of the exhibition ‘Stephen Willats, Time Tumbler’, 22 Nov 2023 – 13 Jan 2024, Victoria Miro, London. Featuring new writing on the artist by Bronaċ Ferran, John Kelsey, Jelena Kristic, and Stephanie Willats.

In celebration of Willats’s 80th birthday and his long-standing collaboration with the gallery, the exhibition demonstrates the evolution of his aesthetic vocabulary and its conceptual underpinning as the world around us has changed.

Concerned with notions of time – within and between the works on view – ‘Stephen Willats, Time Tumbler’ gathers the artist’s first diagram works of the 1970s resulting from site-specific, interactive projects with people in their communities, and juxtaposes these with recent works.

The 176-page cloth-bound book, with a French-folded dust jacket, is printed on three different papers and is richly illustrated with 64 colour plates. It is designed by Joe Hales and printed by Editoriale Bortolazzi Stei.

All images courtesy the artist and Victoria Miro.

Additional info, from Victoria Miro Gallery website:

“For six decades, Willats has concentrated on ideas that today are ever-present in contemporary art: communication, social engagement, active spectatorship, and self-organisation, and has initiated many seminal multi-media art projects everywhere from tennis clubs and public galleries to inner city housing estates. Outside of the norms and conventions of an object-based art world, Willats has developed work which reacts against what he sees as the historical determinism within art. Rather than presenting visitors with icons of certainty he creates a random, complex environment which stimulates visitors to engage in their own creative process rather than merely submitting to passive observation.”