Richard Billingham (UK)

Richard Billingham’s acclaimed and controversial portraits, Ray’s a Laugh, which depict an honest and searing account of his parents’ troubled home-life, will be presented together for the first time with new work portraying his own young family. Also shown will be a series of videos produced by the artist in the late 90s.

Richard Billingham shot to fame in 1996 with his groundbreaking photographic series Ray’s a Laugh, extraordinary pictures of family life in his childhood home, a tower block in Cradley Heath, West Midlands. Ray’s a Laugh was exhibited internationally and featured in the pivotal show, Sensation (1997) at the Royal Academy of Arts. He was awarded the Citibank (now Deutsche Börse) Photography Prize that year, and was nominated for the Turner Prize in 2001. He has continued to photograph his family, and presented a major new body of work in 2010. An ongoing engagement with landscape has seen Billingham working in Britain (Norfolk, ‘Constable Country’ in Suffolk, the South Downs, Black Country, the Gower) and further afield (Ethiopia, Greece, Germany, Pakistan). In his series of photographic and video works entitled Zoo (2001-2006) he explored the lives of animals in captivity. His work is held in numerous private and public collections worldwide, including Tate, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, etc.

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