George Stubbs’s famous horse painting Whistlejacket. Mysteriously back lit, an icon of 18th-century British culture becomes a Ghost of bygone imperial splendour and power. Representing Britain at the Venice Biennale in the same year, he decorated the British pavilion with the Union Jack, replacing the flag’s red, white, and blue with the Irish flag’s orange, white, and green (Oxymoron). In 2004, dressed in a bear costume and visible to nocturnal strollers through the glass frontage, Wallinger trotted around the ground floor of Berlin’s New National Gallery designed by Mies van der Rohe for ten nights. The title Sleeper unites notions of Berlin as bastion of espionage and panic-mongering after 11 September in the heraldic beast of the city. In 2007, in the ground floor of the illustrious Tate Britain, he reconstructed the 40-metre long display that British citizen Brian Haw began erecting in London’s Parliament Square opposite Westminster Palace in 2001 in protest at the Iraq and Afghan wars and British involvement in them — and which the British Government took down last year after a hastily passed ban on demonstrations in the vicinity of government buildings (the Tate Britain though is within the restricted area).

Although Wallinger is one of the major British artists of his generation, the exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig is his first retrospective in Germany. His works have been exhibited in numerous international solo and group exhibitions (e.g. the current Sculpture Projects, Münster) and he himself has been nominated for the prestigious Turner Prize. The exhibition in Braunschweig offers a comprehensive showing of Wallinger’s creative work for the ten-year period from 1996 to 2007 and will include film projections, photographs, objects, installations, and paintings. In addition, a new work is to be produced on site. Arranged neither chronologically nor thematically, the exhibition seeks to assign each work its appropriate space given the Kunstverein’s specific architectural features. The resulting tour is an outstanding presentation of Wallinger’s exceedingly diverse artistic praxis.

The exhibition is a collaboration with the Kunsthaus Aarau, Switzerland.