Richard Wentworth, 1995

Richard Wentworth was included in Lisson's 'Wall Show' in (December - January) 1971, curated by Nicholas Logsdail and including Lawrence Weiner, Blinky Palermo, Sol LeWitt and John Latham. Each artist was invited to make a proposal for one of 20 blank walls. For his blank wall, Wentworth submitted a gridded wallpaper pasting, titled 'Print, tear, mend, paste', 1970. A decade later, Wentworth would present his inaugural exhibition at Lisson gallery, between June - July, 1984, including his famous work 'Shower', 1984, one example of his practice of modifying and transforming the role of mundane objects, imbuing them with new meaning and significance.

The work False Ceiling appeared in Wentworth's fourth solo-exhibition at Lisson between March - April 1995, in which the entire ceiling of the gallery was hung with books, suspended above the viewers' heads, gathered together from London flea markets. By manipulating industrial and/or found objects into works of art, Wentworth subverts their original function and extends our understanding of them by breaking the conventional system of classification. The sculptural arrangements play with the notion of ready-made and juxtaposition of objects that bear no relation to each other.

"When you look at the art of Richard Wentworth, you see materials and objects which appear domestic, industrial or discarded, their function skewed or broken. Stuff from the depths of workshop cupboards or the backs of charity shops; the kind of light industrial leftovers and spare parts produced without pause by the relentless momentum of commodity culture... Simultaneously, Richard Wentworth has created an artistic language which articulates a rearrangement of the periodic table of cultural status, exploring the ways in which the landscape, technologies and clutter of the modern world, the maintenance and manufacture of its fabric, the litter and discard of its processes, the accidental and the chanced upon, can provide the materials and media for excursions into the human consciousness. In this his art identifies the point at which the monolithic processes of mass production and mass media collide with a sense of individual human enquiry, in all its ingenuity, frailty, anxious searching and irrationality."