Keith Tyson
Keith Tyson was born in Cumbria in 1969, studying at the Barrow-in-Furness College of Engineering, Carlisle College of Art and then at the University of Brighton. His first solo exhibition was in 1990.
In the early 1990’s, Tyson worked with various generative processes and methods of randomness. He created the Art Machine which, using computers and flowcharts, generated random ideas for artworks.
The resulting works varied from casting a restaurant menu in lead to bouncing Morse code messages off the moon.
Tyson exhibited a series of Studio Wall Drawings and his piece The Thinker (After Rodin) at the 2001 Venice Biennale. The Thinker, a monolithic hexagonal structure, contains a powerful bank of computers that generated its own universe. The only clue to this activity was an electronic hum. It was this exhibition and those at the South London Gallery and Kunsthalle Zurich that won him the Turner Prize in 2002.
Despite the lack of an obvious signature style, Tyson’s works are linked by an infectious sense of enthusiasm for the diversity, beauty and complexity of nature.
In 2005, Tyson had a solo exhibition ‘Geno Pheno’ at PaceWildenstein’s New York Gallery. In this complex series of works, the genotype-phenotype distinction from genetics was drawn between the two panels of a painted diptych. Here, Tyson explored the relationship between open potential and specific result. From this series Tyson has taken his deckchair inspiration.
Keith Tyson designed two deckchairs for the Royal Parks Foundation.