NICK WAPLINGTON

BIOGRAPHY

Nick Waplington graduated with an MA from the Royal Academy of Art, London in 1991. His publishing practise is broad, with over 30 projects, from zines, which includes a collaboration with the fashion designer Alexander McQueen, and the production of self-publishing and print-on-demand editions. He has exhibited in solo exhibitions at Tate Britain and The Photographers’ Gallery in London, at Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, USA, and at the National Museum of Photography, Film & Television in Bradford, UK; and in group exhibitions at Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy and Brooklyn Museum, New York City.  In 1993 he was awarded an Infinity Award for Young Photographer by the International Center of Photography. His works have been acquired for permanent collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, Victoria and Albert Museum and Government Art Collection in London, National Gallery of Australia, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the Royal Library, Denmark.

The festival centre and CPF has generously been supported by Københavns Kommune, Det Obelske Familiefond and Aage og Johanne Louis-Hansens Fond.

Artist’s website

Photo Credits: Victoria Langenecker
Frames on FRAME

ANAGLYPTA

Nick Waplington (b. 1965) is a British artist, photographer and publisher based between London and New York.
In the 1980s, when only 21 years old, he gained broad acclaim for Living Room, a publication portraying families residing in the same housing estate as his grandfather in the Midlands, England. For the last four decades he has been a key influencer, shaping the development of contemporary photography.
Riddled with grit, but also humour, notoriously sharp, yet sensitive, his photographs capture an energetic and colourful world—from his own family and friends, London’s post punks, skateboarders, families on the West Bank, New York subway travellers, to glorious stereotypes and those on the fringes of society. Much of his work navigates in the thick of things; portraying the wild aspirations of youth, clashes with the police, music festival revellers, and Black Lives Matters protesters.
In his wider artistic practise he works in an archival manner, plotting places and dates, underlining the specifics of place and time whilst, ironically, portraying a universal spectrum of conditions, contradictions, and idiosyncrasies. Often he returns to older themes or images, re-appropriating them, or creating a new life for unpublished works.
His latest publication ANAGLYPTA is a selection of 512 previously unpublished works created between 1980 and 2020. For Copenhagen Photo Festival 2021, seven images from the book were exhibited at the festival centre on a grand scale at FRAMES on FRAME. The book was distributed as part of the artist’s own poster performance, or action—by wallpapering the images in the public sphere across Copenhagen in early June 2021.

We celebrated his two interventions here in Copenhagen in 2021 somewhat like an overdue comeback. Waplington last exhibited in Denmark at Billed Huset, in Copenhagen in 1995, after which a work from the series Living Room was acquired for the collections at the Royal Library, Denmark.