Artists

Tim Head

Shop prints

Tim Head's work is about instability and uncertainty: of images, of perception and of the individual's relationship with the wider world. Over the past forty years he has developed a considerable body of work in an extraordinary range of media – including installations, photography, paintings and now digital media – guided and underpinned by a consistent set of concerns. His work represents an interrogation of contemporary reality.

Tim Head studied with Richard Hamilton at the Universityof Newcastle-upon-Tyne 1965-69 and then with Barry Flanagan at St Martin’s in London 1969-70. In 1968 he spent a year in New York working as assistant to Claes Oldenburg and meeting leading figures in the Conceptual Art movement, including Robert Smithson and Sol Lewitt. In 1971 he worked as an assistant to Robert Morris. Since 1971 Head has been an influential teacher at both Goldsmiths and the Slade in London.

Since the 1990s Head has developed an innovative and important body of work focussed on an exploration of digital space. This new work uses projections LCD displays and inkjet prints to articulate 'the digital medium's elusive material substance'. The work focuses on the digital medium's elusive material substance and on our evolving relationship to it as a physical entity. It uses the medium's physical characteristics that make it uniquely different from other media. Bypassing its usual role of representing images and texts, the work deals directly with

its basic material elements - the luminous fabric of pixels on a screen or digital projection, the flurry of microscopic ink droplets laid down by the inkjet printer, and the hidden real time calculations of the computer operating at ultra fast speeds that drive these elements. The medium's underlying material substance is exposed, moving it out from its usual confinement in virtual space towards the same physical space that we ourselves occupy.