Richard Wilson (installation artist)

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This page is about the installation artist. For other people named Richard Wilson, see Richard Wilson (disambiguation)

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Richard Wilson (born 1953) is a British installation artist.

Wilson was born in Islington, London and studied at Hornsey College of Art and the University of Reading. He was short-listed for the Turner Prize in 1988 (when Tony Cragg won) and 1989 (when Richard Long won).

Wilson often works on an architectural scale, often changing large spaces in some dramatic way. One of his best known pieces, 20:50 (1987), consists of a room half-flooded with used sump oil in which the ceiling of the space is reflected, producing a disorienting effect. 20:50 was commissioned for Matts Gallery in East London and was brought by Charles Saatchi and has been re-installed in a variety of formations at the Saatchi Gallery. It is considered by many people to be the masterpiece of the genre of site-specific installation art, due to how successfully it envelopes the viewer into its rendition of the space.

In the 1990s and 21st century, Wilson has continued to work on a large scale to fulfil his ambitions to "tweak or undo or change the interiors of space... in that way unsettle or break peoples preconceptions of space, what they think space might be", including an installation near London's Millenium Dome called "Slice of Reality" in 2000. It consisted of a portion (15%) of a ship being sliced off from the rest and mounted on the river bed.