Simon Starling is a British conceptual artist who won the Turner Prize in 2005 with Shedboatshed that involved taking a wooden shed, turning it into a boat, sailing it down the Rhine and turning it back into a shed. Starling's works are known for being interested in the making process and in the craft of being an artist. They are knotted with complex backstories yet are also instantly enticing.

The first survey of the Turner Prize winning artist’s work in Australasia, In Speculum brings together a major new commission alongside key works that focus particularly on the site of the studio and workshop, and the relationships between art, technology, history and modernity.

In Speculum is a partnership project between Monash University of Art, Melbourne, IMA (Institute of Modern Art), Brisbane and City Gallery Wellington. It was recently exhibited at the IMA where Starling's artworks were described as 'always having something unexpected, excessive, witty, perverse, serendiptious, convoluted, or crafty about them'. 

Starling's recent video work Phantom Ride, for the Tate Britain Commission, was an eight minute history of Tate's Duveen Gallery that doubled as a 'white knuckled rollercoaster ride in the past, the camera swooping and diving as it takes in bygone paintings and sculptures'. Starling comments that a space is never fresh, never a blank canvas and that he likes to capture the past images that are floating around. Hear more from Starling in a video interview with him about this work.

Simon Starling was born in Epsom in England but lives and works in Copenhagen. He studied photography and art at Maidstone College of Art, Trent Polytechnic Nottingham and Glasgow School of Art. Since his first solo exhibition at the Showroom in London in 1995, his work has been widely exhibited in the UK and elsewhere and is held in the permanent collections of museums such as Tate Modern, London; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Solomon R. Guggenheim Musuem, New York; Kroller Muller Museum, Netherlands; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Contemporary Art. In 2004, Starling was shortlisted for the Guggenheim's Hugo Boss Prize for contemporary art.  Simon Starling is represented by the Modern Institute, Glasgow; Casy Kaplan, New York; Franco Nero, Truin; and Neugerriemschneider, Berlin.

*image (left)
Simon Starling,
Project for a Masquerade (Hiroshima) 2010 (film still).
Courtesy the artist and Casey Kaplan, New York.
Photo: Simon Starling