Light sculptures from the archive

The three light installations, Excessive Sensual Indulgence, 1996; Smoking Finger, 2012 and Forever (yellow neon vers.), 2015, in their Humber Street Gallery exhibition are sometimes referred to as anti-monuments; they are contradictory and reference our contemporary consumer culture.

Sticks with Dicks and Slits, a new body of sculptural works, Tim Noble and Sue Webster present pairs of giant self-portraits, stick figures sculpted in twisted bronze. Based on handmade maquettes made with electrical wire, the sculptures are an act of upscaling playful ephemera into physically domineering artworks with a permanency and scale that transcends human limitations.

The Masterpiece, 2014 is a shadow self-portrait of the artists created from metal casts of dead vermin they collected and welded together into a ball. From afar the casts appear to be a stunning abstract silver sculpture; on closer inspection the disturbing menagerie of creatures emerges, only to change form again—as a shadow on the wall—into a precise and elegant image that is astonishingly different from the objects that create it.

Launch of the publication The Folly Acres Cook Book alongside an exhibition of sculpture and illustrations from the book inspired by Folly Acres, the Gloucestershire smallholding shared by Tim and Sue.

Welcoming the effects of accident and the subconscious in their work. The series is comprised of large black and white portrait paintings as well as smaller works on paper that the artists painted with their feet.

In a second series of paintings, the artists wipe and fling excess paint left over from the portraits onto blank canvases, these unconstrained abstractions embody an act of doing without thinking.

Launch of the publication The Folly Acres Cook Book alongside an exhibition of sculpture and illustrations from the book inspired by Folly Acres, the Gloucestershire smallholding shared by Tim and Sue.

Half Cast, a solo project by Tim Noble, takes the form of a life-size sculpture portrait, the top half of his collaborative partner and wife, Sue Webster and the bottom half of Tim Noble himself. The Door is literally a door on Ingestre Place, Soho, London, which will rotate its exhibitions on a monthly basis and aims to showcase the best of British art.

Other Criteria welcomes Tim Noble and Sue Webster as the next artists to produce an edition created for the gallery based at New Bond Street. Continuing to explore their investigation into self-portraiture the artists have produced an edition of ten bronze works and a series of unique monoprints.

Nihilistic Optimistic is Tim Noble & Sue Webster's first major solo exhibition in London since 2006, and brings together six large-scale works to build upon the artists' sustained investigation into self-portraiture. The relationship between materiality and form, which has been so intrinsic to their practice, is further deconstructed as these sculptures appear in a state of half-formed chaos, perhaps simultaneously disintegrating and materialising.

The Vinyl Factory Gallery. Continuing their journey into self-portraiture, Tim & Sue have collaborated with The Vinyl Factory Chelsea to present a exhibit called NO. The show consists of 11 iconic portrait photographs of the artists taken by Dennis Morris, famed for his work with the Sex Pistols, Bob Marley, and PiL, and a new sound installation by Tim & Sue – on display at The Vinyl Factory Chelsea, 91 Walton Street from 12 October–4th November 2012.

Monumental both in scale and ambition, Turning the Seventh Corner is a site-specific installation inspired by the tombs of the Egyptian Pharaohs which has been made in collaboration with the internationally acclaimed architect David Adjaye.

Turning the Seventh Corner is contained in the new Blain|Southern, Berlin gallery, a concrete, steel and glass structure, formerly the printing presses of the German Liberal newspaper, Der Tagesspiegel.

A cacophony of stuffed animals dramatically spotlit onto a wall to form a portrait silhouette of the late fashion icon Isabella Blow has been acquired by the National Portrait Gallery.

'The portrait encourages us to reflect simultaneously on beauty and death,' says Rosie Broadley, Associate Curator of the Contemporary Collections, 'which embody Blow's own complex preoccupations.'

British artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster have worked together since the early 1990s and over the years they have produced a remarkable series of sculptures that have been exhibited in prestigious public art institutions around the world. For their first solo exhibition in Russia, they have produced a stunning collection of work that best reflects their ongoing fascination with silhouettes and self-analysis.

Electric Fountain is a spectacular public artwork by acclaimed British artists Tim Noble & Sue Webster representing their modern take on the world's oldest form of public art, the fountain. It simultaneously references iconic pop culture symbols, such as marquee signs in Las Vegas and Times Square, and historical fountains built in civic spaces, such as Bernini's Triton Fountain.

A monument for the 21st century, Electric Fountain is a celebration of the spectacle, excess, beauty, and desire of contemporary culture and a provocative comment on the nature of consumer society, a theme often present in Noble & Webster's work.

The focus of the exhibition is a kinetic sculptural installation entitled Scarlett, which features a worktable on which numerous disturbing and monstrous mechanical toys are defecating, rubbing, sucking, fucking and the like. The moveable parts are brought to life by sensors detecting the viewer's circumnavigation of the piece, giving the viewer control over the displays of sexual violence, perversion, neglect, death, filth and chaos. In Noble & Webster's "Garden of Earthy Delights", unlike the original by Hieronymus Bosch, playing the part of the innocent bystander is impossible.

The exhibition includes a wide variety of works drawn from over a decade of the couple's prolific artistic endeavours, often characterized by Noble and Webster as being "consistently inconsistent." No matter how "inconsistent" their catalogue may appear, all of the works are closely and obviously linked by their allusions to the artists' emotional, spiritual, and sexual relationship, as well as by the underlying conceptual social statements derived from the fusion of opposites: "form and anti-form, high culture and anti-culture, male and female, craft and rubbish, sex and violence."

Human Stains an exhibition of work completed by the artists over the period of a two week residency at Medium at St. Barths. Gallery founder Fergus McCaffrey co-established the artist residency and gallery from 2005 to 2008, facilitating artists to create work on the island, including: David Noonan, Kelley Walker, Douglas Gordon, and duo Tim Noble and Sue Webster.

Sacrificial Heart is a large, rotating sculpture of a bleeding heart studded with hundreds of flashing coloured lights. Here, the archetypal Christian emblem fuses with the classic tattoo of rock n' roll and/biker iconography in a mesmerizing display that pulsates with light. This sculpture is their first three-dimensional freestanding sculpture which rotates.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster are interested in the way mundane aspects of popular culture can yield surprising pleasures. Their work Serving Suggestion takes the typically British meal of beans and sausages in a can and transforms it into a sexual joke with a sausage at it's centre.

Tim Noble & Sue Webster use of neon and flashing light directs us toward what we desire like a divine beacon. Toxic Schizophrenia, a titanic pierced heart sculptural emblem, is a site specific commission for MCA Denver. "The concept of the emblem is central to art: An emblem that can represent faith and fidelity, love as well as hate, fear as well as resolution, understanding and ignorance, sophistication and vulgarity, waste and value, friendship and alienation, male and female, negative and positive. In other words, an endless string of opposites that can tear the world apart or hold it together. (Excerpt from Norman Rosenthal's essay "The Magic Arts of Noble & Webster" from the publication Wasted Youth).

According to Freud, young children are, by nature, "polymorphously perverse," which is to say that they can display sexual tendencies that adults would regard as perverse like finding erotic pleasure from their own bodies. Education however quickly suppresses infantile sexuality but it is retained in the subconscious mind of adults. This term is the title of a new exhibition by Tim Noble and Sue Webster at the Freud Museum.

The The Glory Hole is comprised of new works that build on Noble and Webster's exploration of sculpture and their shadows as vehicles for juxtaposing positive and negative space. The show continues the artists' investigation of self-referential shadows using scraps of abstracted discarded steel to create purer shadowy forms, and placed in a darkened room and lit from a very particular standpoint, these cold, permanent, abstract, steel works give way to surprising soft, ephemeral, representational images.

It is particularly appropriate that the artists have chosen this venue to debut their latest drawings, titled The Joy of Sex. Through the appellation of the suite of 40 works on paper is a direct citation of the 1970s cult-classic "gourmet guide to love-making," the concept of a how-to manual for sex is in actuality descended from such Eastern sources as Indian Tantra scrolls, Japanese Ukiyoe prints and the Chun Hwa paintings from the Joseon Dynasty in Korea.

"The work of Tim Noble and Sue Webster is distinguished by its high sense of criticism, and above all, self criticism, as they are often the protagonists of their works. Their aim is to a different vision of the surroundings, emphasising the consequences on it that phenomena such as consumerism, mass culture and the elevation of the figure of the artist to the position of media celebrity have." Francisco de la Torre Prados, Mayor of Malaga.

Tim Noble and Sue Webster's aptly titled exhibition, Modern Art is Dead, is an irreverent version of a shadowy Plato's Cave. The naughty couple continue to astound audiences with their transgressive alchemy of light, shadow—and scraps of steel!

In the bawdily titled The Crack, we enter a dark room where an assemblage of welded steel scraps stands in the middle of the gallery like a lonely Giacometti figure. A light source in front of the sculpture casts a halo of light—and a crack-like shadow—against the wall behind it. Initially confounding (most tend to see the shadow as a positive space) we realize that the shadow is the negative space between two standing nude figures facing each other—self-portraits by Noble and Webster.

Bright lights, piles of rubbish, and shadowy figures characterize urban centers; they are also the primary elements in the art of the British team Tim Noble & Sue Webster.

Tim Noble & Sue Webster explores the team's mature work, including seven examples of illuminations, shadow sculptures, and their latest neon forms: a boy/girl couple covered with streetwise slang. Alternately bright and blatant, dark and seductive, Noble and Webster portray themselves and the world around them in a smart, romanticized, yet unpretentious style.

P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center presents Tim Noble and Sue Webster, a selected survey of artworks by the renowned British artists. Partners in both life and art, Tim Noble & Sue Webster explore the toxic influences of consumer culture through new modes of portraiture. Turning garbage into complex and visually arresting sculptural installations, Noble and Webster exploit, manipulate, and transform base materials, often using self-portraiture to undermine the "celebrated" authorship of the artist.

For Black Magic they decided to dig deep onto the bowels of their minds and unleash their subconscious to produce a set of thirteen images presented as a portfolio of prints. In them they continue to explore themes of love and sin, indulgence and obsession. Throughout their career they have occasionally made individual paintings like Don't Fuck with the Blackheads, 1998 or From Fuck to Trash, 2000, but have never produced a body of this type of work.

Following the overwhelmingly positive public response to Ghastly Arrangements during its first weekend, national critics are now voicing their support for the show. Waldemar Januszczak said in The Sunday Times yesterday: "Thank heavens for Noble & Webster. . . Without this pair of vulgar, loud, sickish self-portraitists, there would be a sizeable hole in our country's post-YBA terrain. Without them, nothing much of note would be happening right now."

Gagosian gallery is pleased to announce the first exhibition in Los Angeles by London based artists Tim Noble and Sue Webster. In this exhibition, the artists pursue a continuing fascination with the thrills of illumination, love, language, shadows and cash by producing brand new works inspired by the ostensible glamour of Beverly Hills.

The title piece Instant Gratification is triggered like a Las Vegas slot machine. Insert a token in the money machine and before your eyes a flurry of real dollar bills attempt to obscure a projected vision of the artists' self portraits in a postured kiss on the lips. When the dollars settle, the image is once more complete, magically rendered from an apparently formless mound of dollar bills.

British Wildlife is a brilliant work in daylight as well as in shadow. Its sculptural form is as interesting as the shadow formed by its outline, "classical" busts of Tim and Sue in a pose of grief. In its formal sculptural quality, it is a prelude to the later welded metal works. The work is a tribute to Tim's father, but it is also a tribute to the tradition of wildlife as a subject in British art and an evocation of the special affection in British culture for the animals associated with bird-watching and hunting. (Excerpt from Jeffery Deitch's essay "Black Magic" from the publication Wasted Youth).

Heaps of garbage, tacky fairground lights, and ghostlike shadows were the principal elements of Tim Noble and Sue Webster's exhibition I ♥You. Like alchemists or magicians, Noble and Webster make something extraordinary out of the most humble materials. They create romantic images of hope out of darkness and debris.

Upon entering the gallery, the visitor found the floor strewn with spotlit mounds of domestic garbage. Looking up onto the walls, one was astounded to see astonishingly realistic silhouette portraits of the artists created by the shadows of the garbage piles. Images of love appeared miraculously from the heaps of garbage created by what the artists consumed while they were making them. Tim Noble and Sue Webster, who work as a team, are among the most celebrated of their generation of British artists. I ♥You was their first exhibition in New York.

. . . Also in the show are two flashy wall-mounted light sculptures—I Love You, (2000) and Excessive Sensual Indulgence (1997)—made of cheap light bulbs which reference popular culture at its tackiest. Inspired by Las Vegas style faux-glam as well as neon signs, they exploit the vacuousness of cheap casino glitz to arrive at a dazzling, iconic, and decidedly anti-minimalist approach to sculpture.

Their work is as much about the aestheticization of banality and excessive consumerism as it is about exposing the relentless hype of art world politics. At the same time it offers a completely new take on the tradition of portraiture as well as the idea that something can be made out of almost anything.

The New Barbarians [catalogue]
Spacex Gallery, Exeter, UK. 1999

Tim Noble and Sue Webster's commission, The New Barbarians is based upon a diorama at the Museum of Natural History in New York. The diorama shows a reconstruction of two Australopithecines, early ancestors of Homo sapiens dating back 3.5 million years ago. Based on newly found footprints, the reconstruction suggests a male and female walking alongside each other. This provided new evidence that the human species was beginning to form social relationships at this time.

Noble and Webster created a version of the figures overlaid with their own facial features. The couple stand isolated in an apparently infinite space created within an otherwise empty gallery. The piece continues Noble & Webster's concern with pairing and love, impermanence and immortality.

Despite an aggressive trash-pop aesthetic, Noble and Webster still manage to make enthrallingly beautiful light installations, even when they pretend not to try and that's what puts their thumbs bang on the pulse of contemporary culture.

Their engagement with advertising media led onto issues of celebrity. To examine the phenomenon of media-hyped art-stars they organized 1997s Turning the Tables—a live DJ event at the Chisenhale Gallery in which well-known female artists took turns at spinning the decks.

Over the past three years Noble & Webster have established a reputation for making installations of signage that glisten with a dazzling array of moving patterns of light.

Inspired by a space that might lie somewhere between Las Vegas and Blackpool these works hint at both romance & escapism as well as suggesting that there might be more sinister, cynical forces at play. For their third solo show WOW Noble & Webster are presenting three new works that build up an overview of their ever eclectic practice.

Absorbing their influence from tattoos, Las Vegas inspired movies, outmoded corporate advertising and Blackpool's glitzy facade, the artists have constructed brilliant displays of shifting light.

These wall mounted works, manipulated by computer operated sequences present us with an apparently superficial and mesmerising interpretation of the intricacy involved with both personal and cultural relationships. Taking core elements of the artists continuing interest in extremities of situation and the polarisation inherent in any form of collaboration, Noble and Webster are attempting an unwitting seduction.

"A Union Jack rubbish bin, flattened to resemble an oversized cod-piece, greeted visitors to British Rubbish. I wanted to ask where the safety pins were but I resisted the temptation, . . . A catalogue featuring biographical fragments included ironic references to Punk and a number of crudely drawn self-portraits portrayed Noble and Webster as foul-mouthed misfits." (Excerpt from David Burrows article for Variant issue 1.)

Burning, Bright [news]
The Pace Gallery, New York, U.S. 2011

Hunters and Gatherers: The Art of Assemblage [news]
Sotheby's, New York, U.S. 2011

Peeping Tom 2 [news]
Kunsthal KAdE, Amersfoort, Netherlands. 2011

Phantasmagoria
FaMa Gallery, Verona, Italy. 2011

Passion Fruits—The Thomas Olbricht Collection
me Collectors Room Berlin, Berlin, Germany. 2010

Peeping Tom
VEGAS gallery, 45 Vyner Street, London, UK. 2010

Please Write [news]
POSTED, 67 Wilton Way, London, UK. 2010–2011

Rude Britannia—British Comic Art
Tate Britain, London, UK. 2010

Skin Fruit—Selections from the Dakis Joannou Collection
New Museum, New York, NY, U.S. 2010

The Surreal House
Barbican Art Gallery, London, UK. 2010

The Unconscious in Everyday Life [news]
Science Museum, London, UK. 2010–2011

Vanitas, The Transience of Earthly Pleasures
33 Portland Place, London, UK. 2010

Innovations in the Third Dimension: Sculpture of Our Time
Bruce Museum, Greenwich, U.S. 2009

Mythologies
Haunch of Venision, London, UK. 2009

Une Image Peut en Cacher une Autre: Arcimboldo, Dali (The Double Image from Arcimboldo to Dali), Raetz
Galeries Nationales du Grand Palais, Paris, France. 2009

Un Certain État du Monde? A Selection of Works From François Pinault Foundation Collection
Garage Center for Contemporary Culture, Moscow, Russia. 2009

Blickmaschinen (Visual Tactics. Optical Instruments in History
and Contemporary Art)
Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Siegen, Germany; Mücsarnok/Kunsthalle, Budapest, Hungary; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Sevilla, Spain. 2008–2009

End Game—British Contemporary Art from the Chaney Family Collection
The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, TX, U.S. 2008

Excerpt—Selection from the Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn Collection
The Frances Lehman Loeb Arts Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY, U.S. 2008–2009.

Heavy Metal: On the Inexplicable Lightness of a Material
Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany. 2008–2009

Statuephilia: Contemporary sculptors at the British Museum [press]
The British Museum, London, UK. 2008–2009

An Archaeology—The Zabludowicz Collection
Project Space 176, London, UK. 2007

Fractured Figure—Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection
DESTE Foundation, Athens, Greece. 2007–2008

Haunted Screens
University Buffalo Art Gallery, Center for the Arts, Buffalo, NY, U.S. 2007

Looking Up
Mário Sequeira Gallery, Braga, Portugal. 2007

Passage Du Temps—Collection François Pinault Foundation
Lille 3000, Lille, France. 2007

Pop Art Is . . .
Gagosian Gallery, Britannia Street, London, UK. 2007

Reconstruction #2
Sudeley Castle, Winchcombe, Gloucestershire, UK. 2007

Rockers Island—Olbricht Collection
Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany. 2007

Star Power—Museum as Body Electric
Museum of Contemporary Art, Denver, CO, U.S. 2007

Traum & Trauma (Dream & Trauma)—Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection
Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna, Austria; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria. 2007

True Romance
Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna, Austria; Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, Germany; Kunsthalle zu Kiel der Christian-Albrechts-Universität, Kiel, Germany. 2007–2008

Shadow Play: Shadow and Light in Contemporary Art—A Homage to Hans Christian Andersen
Kunsthallen Brandts Klædefabrik, Odense, Denmark; Kunsthalle zu Kiel, Kiel, Germany; Landesgalerie am Oberösterreichischen Landesmuseum, Linz, Austria. 2005–2006

Jewellery by Contemporary Artists
Louisa Guinness Gallery, London, UK. 2004

Monument To Now
The Dakis Joannou Collection, Athens, Greece. 2004

New Blood
Saatchi Gallery, London, UK. 2004

The Ten Commandments
Deutsches Hygiene-Museum, Dresden, Germany. Curated by Klaus Bisenbach. 2004

State of Play
The Serpentine Gallery, London, UK. 2004

Perpetual Bliss
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris, France. 2003

Skulptur 03
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Austria. 2003

Form Follows Fiction
Castello di Rivoli—Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Turin, Italy. Curated by Jeffrey Deitch. 2002

Melodrama
ARTIUM Vitoria-Gasteiz; Centro José Guerrero, Granada; MARCO, Vigo, Spain. 2002

Shortcuts—Works from the Dakis Joannou Collection
Nicosia Municipal Arts Centre, Cyprus. 2002

Summer Reading
Gagosian Gallery, Beverly Hills, CA, U.S. 2002

When Philip Met Isabella
The Design Museum, London, UK. 2002

2001 A Space Oddity
The Colony Room Club, London, UK. 2001

Casino 2001: 1st Quadrennial
Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst, Ghent, Belgium. Curated by Jeanie Greenberg Rohatyn. 2001–2002

Electrify Me!
Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York, U.S. 2001. Curated by Mark Fletcher.

Exposure: Recent Acquisitions from the Doron Sebbag Art Collection, O.R.S. Ltd
Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel. 2001

London Orphan Asylum
University of Tasmania, Plimsoll Gallery, Tasmania, Australia. 2001

Tattoo Show
Modern Art, London, UK. 2001

Exposure: Recent Acquisitions from the Doron Sebbag Art Collection, O.R.S. Ltd
Museum of Art, Tel Aviv, Israel. 2000

London Orphan Asylum
Open Space, Milan, Italy; Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia. Curated by Gilda Williams. 2000

Man—Body in Art from 1950 to 2000
Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen, Denmark. 2000

Sex and the British
Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg, Austria; Paris, France. Curated by Norman Rosenthal and Max Wigram. 2000

Impakt Festival for Audio-Visual Arts
Utrecht, The Netherlands. 1998

Internationales Videofenster
Basel, Switzerland, DOT Gallery, Barcelona, Spain. 1998

Let's Play Risk
Juice, London, UK. 1998

SupaStore Supastars
SupaStore at Tomato, London, UK. 1998

The Whole Year Inn
The Agency, London, UK. 1998

Livestock Market
Rivington Street and Charlotte Road, London, UK. 1997

Non Stop Body Rock
Transmission Gallery, Glasgow, UK. 1997

Turning the Tables
live DJ event, Chisenhale Gallery, London, UK. Curated by Tim Noble &
Sue Webster. 1997

Unique!
Kunstpark Ost, Munich, Germany. 1997

Fools Rain
Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK. Curated by Max Wigram. 1996

Glass Shelf Show
artists' multiples, Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, UK. 1996

Mission Impossible
Bricks & Kicks, Vienna, Austria. 1996

New Contemporaries
Liverpool Tate, Liverpool and Camden Arts Centre, London, UK. 1996

Roadworks
site specific bus shelter project, London, UK. Curated by FAT. 1996

Special Offer
Art Chain Store, Calvert Avenue, London, UK. 1996

Try
part of the VAA course, Royal College of Art, London, UK. 1996

Yerself is Steam
85 Charlotte Street, London, UK. 1996

The Hanging Picnic
Hoxton Square, London, UK. 1995

Postscript
Lisson Gallery, London, UK. 1995

Self Storage
Wembley, London, UK. Curated by Artangel, Brian Eno and Laurie Anderson. 1995

Young British Artists
EIGEN + ART at Independent Art Space, London, UK. 1995

The Fete Worse Than Death
Hoxton Square, London, UK. 1994

Hijack
New York U.S.; London, UK; Berlin, Germany. 1994