Graduating from Goldsmiths College, London, in 1990, Gillian Wearing (b.1963) found acclaim as a Young British Artist (YBA) and won the Turner Prize in 1997. Using video, photography, sculpture and painting, she probes the boundaries between private and public, fact and fiction, and the individual and society. Her early video work captured the deepest secrets of anonymous participants, while for the photographic series ‘Album’ (2003), she dressed up as members of her family (including herself at younger ages), transforming her appearance with lifelike masks, costumes and makeup. In her self-portrait series ‘Spiritual Family’ (2008-present), she adopts the guise of artists she admires such as Andy Warhol, Diane Arbus and, as here, the Italian Baroque painter Artemisia Gentileschi, whose Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1638-39) provided inspiration for the photograph. Throughout Wearing’s works, masks become metaphors for self-projection and the social performances that people enact in their daily lives.