For his seventh solo exhibition with carlier | gebauer, the Turner Prize winning artist Mark Wallinger will present his new series id Paintings.

According to Freud, the id, driven by the pleasure principle, is the source of all psychic energy. Wallinger’s id Paintings (2015) are intuitive and guided by instinct, echoing the primal, impulsive and libidinal characteristics of the id.

These monumental paintings have grown out of Wallinger’s longstanding self- portrait series, and reference the artist’s own body. Wallinger’s height – or arm span – is the basis of the canvas size, they are exactly this measurement in width and double in height. Created by sweeping paint-laden hands across the canvas in active, freeform gestures, the id Paintings bear the evidence of their making and of the artist’s performed encounter with the surface. The perceptible handprints within the paint recall cave paintings and signpost a single active participant. The paintings are apprehended at the point of arrest, encouraging forensic examination. Wallinger uses symmetrical bodily gestures, causing the two halves of the canvas to mirror one another. Through this process, reference could be made to the bilateral symmetry of Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘Vitruvian Man’, an ideal representation of the human body and its denotations of proportion in mirror writing. The paintings bear a deliberate visual resemblance to the Rorschach test: in recognizing figures and shapes in the material, the viewer reveals their own desires and predilections, or perhaps tries to interpret those of the artist.