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Victor Burgin
Shortlisted: 1986

Victor Burgin's art is inseparable from his theoretical writings, which are steeped in the ideas of poetical, psychoanalytical and linguistic theorists such as Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes. During the 1970s his work was based on the juxtaposition of texts and images; in the years leading up to his nomination in 1986 he explored the representation of women, drawing attention to how women are 'fetishised' through types of imagery.

Victor Burgin was born in Sheffield, England in 1941. He attended the Royal College of Art from 1962 to 1965, and studied at Yale University from 1965 to 1967. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1986 for his exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts and Kettle's Yard Gallery in Cambridge, and his collection of essays, The End of Theory and Between.

This information has been taken from The Turner Prize: Twenty Years, by Virginia Button, Tate Publishing, 2003.

View Victor Burgin in the Tate Collection