Keith Tyson valuation
Turner Prize winner who built a machine to tell him what to make, and then made it.
Keith Tyson was born in Ulverston, Cumbria, in 1969 and trained in mechanical engineering at Barrow-in-Furness College of Engineering before Carlisle College of Art and the Alternative Practice degree at the University of Brighton, which he finished in 1993.
What a work by Keith Tyson is worth
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Bio
Keith Tyson was born in Ulverston, Cumbria, in 1969 and trained in mechanical engineering at Barrow-in-Furness College of Engineering before Carlisle College of Art and the Alternative Practice degree at the University of Brighton, which he finished in 1993. In the early 1990s he built the Artmachine, a system of computer programs, flow charts and books that generated chance combinations of words and ideas, which he then had to realise as objects, whatever they asked for. One result was a very large painting made with bathroom sealant. He won the Turner Prize in 2002, the year of Supercollider at the South London Gallery and a solo show at Kunsthalle Zürich. The work has stayed deliberately varied, across painting, drawing, sculpture and installation, and draws on mathematics, science and myth.
Because he does not keep to one style, the first job is to work out which body of work a piece belongs to. The Studio Wall Drawings, made since 1997, are large works on paper of the same size, about 158 by 126 centimetres, that act as a journal and are titled by date. The Nature Paintings of 2005 to 2008 were made by letting paint, pigment and chemicals react on acid-primed aluminium panels, so the surface is the work and is hard to retouch. Sculptures and multi-part pieces need all their parts and any instructions. There are also a small number of editions, including one for Parkett. Invoices from his galleries, which have included Anthony Reynolds, Haunch of Venison, Pace and now Hauser & Wirth, are the usual documentation.
At a glance
- Born
- 1969, Ulverston
Large Field Array, and the museum collections
Large Field Array, 300 modular units set out in a grid across a gallery's floor and walls, went from 2006 to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark, De Pont in Tilburg and PaceWildenstein in New York, and the Zabludowicz Collection showed it again in Finland in 2017. The Musée Marmottan Monet in Paris gave him a show in 2019, the year of Life Still at Hauser & Wirth in London, and The Generative Universe followed at Hauser & Wirth in Los Angeles in 2026.
Tate holds Molecular Compound No. 4, of 1999, and a Studio Wall Drawing of 2006. He showed at the Venice Biennale in 2001 and received the ICA's Arts and Innovation Award in 1996.
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