Mike Smith Jackson Pollock Mark Wallinger Dealer Holly Solomon’s Papers Headed to Smithsonian Warhols Send Sotheby’s Soaring Busa Paintings Pilfered from Son’s Home From Raging Bulls to Miserable Drips Faking It at Frieze

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In one of his two adjoining studios, Mark Wallinger is making tea. And the writer, as writers customarily do while artists are being hospitable, is snooping. The Essex-born Wallinger, who was raised in a socialist household and for years toiled alongside Trotskyists in a leftist bookshop “until it was firebombed for stocking [Salman Rushdie’s] The Satanic Verses,” has evidently sidestepped the trappings and potential traps of success. No assistants bustle about: “I want to be an artist, not run a small business,” Wallinger later asserts, his rumpled geniality making it clear he’s not merely antisocial. Alone for art’s sake, he uses one compact room primarily for thinking, and the other—taken over from two printmakers whose audible and spectacularly banal conversations (“literally about the price of baked beans”) drove Wallinger to distraction—for hands-on practice. What, in these workaday spaces, amid laptops and books on World War I and deskbound ephemera such as a vintage View-Master stereoscopic photo viewer, does the snoop see?

In total, Wallinger’s recent past and imminent future in embryo. On the floor of the “making” room is a scatter of chunky pebbles, taken from the River Thames and handpainted with different numerals. This was a test run for Folk Stones (2008), Wallinger’s first permanent public artwork, recently unveiled at the Folkestone Triennial. A rectangle of (officially) 19,240 numbered small stones from the English seaside town’s beach, inserted into cement, it commemorates— in a Sisyphean manner—the number of British and Allied soldiers killed on the first day of the Battle of the Somme, many of whom embarked from Folkestone. Dividing the room is a length of string that, reaching one wall, zigzags down it: a reminder of Wallinger’s Zone (2007) for last year’s Skulptur Projekte Münster. There, he installed a three-mile circle of string, positioned constantly above sea level, intended to be visible intermittently to viewers as they turned their gaze toward the heavens. (The pertinent analogy, for Wallinger, is with Eruv, the “exclusion zones” Orthodox Jews set up in which certain laws of the Sabbath do not apply.) Nearby are signs of Wallinger’s recent return to painting after a 13-year hiatus: modest stretchers emblazoned with large examples of the letter I in various fonts—a diversity of externally determined symbols for selfhood. Back in the “thinking” room, meanwhile, Photoshopped images insert a giant horse into an English landscape. More on that anon.

The eve of an expansive 20-year retrospective for the 2007 Turner Prize–winning artist seems like the ideal time to ask: What kind of artist is Mark Wallinger? The question used to be easier to answer. Ostensibly, from the mid-’80s to 1997 he essayed “Englishness”: flexibly reflecting his country’s attitudes to race, class, and sex, Wallinger photographed himself in foreign disguises in a photo booth (Passport Control [1988]), burlesquing the stereotyping of other ethnicities; he made full-length “court portraits” of homeless individuals outside London’s financial institutions (Capital [1990]) and numerous Stubbsian ones of horses (horse breeding, Wallinger once stated, is “eugenics by proxy”); and, famously, he bought and raced a horse of his own, A Real Work of Art (1994). His localism, says Wallinger, was fully deliberate. “Starting out, I went to the Cologne art fair and saw a lot of ‘Esperanto art’ that could have come from anywhere. Yet there’s a particularity to one’s accident of birth. I’m quite a big Joycean and I like the fact that, although he put himself in self-conscious exile from Ireland and the church, he kind of wrote about them for the rest of his life. That seemed important to me, that you’re true to the particularities of those things.”