The Asset Strippers

Recently Tate Britain unveiled the asset strippers, a major new work by Mike Nelson.

The Asset Strippers has been created for the annual Tate Britain Commission, supported by Sotheby’s, which invites artists to create a new artwork in response to the grand space of the Duveen Galleries.

Mike Nelson has transformed the heart of Tate Britain into somewhere between a sculpture court and an asset strippers’ warehouse, carefully selecting objects from a past world, the post-war Britain that framed his childhood. Nelson’s project has been informed by the Duveen Galleries’ origins as the first purpose-built sculpture galleries in England, intended to rival the sculpture court at the British Museum and the V&A’s cast room, turning the neo-classical galleries into a warehouse of monuments to a lost era and the vision of society it represented.

Born in Loughborough in 1967, Mike Nelson is best known for his large-scale, site-specific sculptural environments that often arise from a period of living and working in a particular location. His works fuse literary, filmic, socio-political and cultural references to create carefully orchestrated tableaux. Nelson has exhibited widely across the world, most recently at the OGR - Officine Grandi Riparazioni, Turin, 2018 and Gwangju Biennale, 2018. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2011 and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001 and 2007. He became a Royal Academician in 2013 and in 2018 was awarded the Wollaston Award.