The Purloined Image 1983

 

Biography and Selected Exhibits

Marie Yates was born and raised in Greater Manchester, England in 1940, and she is a feminist fine artist.

She began exhibiting her conceptual works in the early 70's and by the 1980's her works could be seen in the main British galleries such as the ICA, London, the Riverside Studios, the Midland Group and the Arnolfini as well as other regional public galleries. Her works also travelled to The New Museum in New York and other venues in the US and Europe.

She developed her work through the ideas and arguments of concept art and feminist discourses, using image and text through photography.

From 1978 onwards the work was addressing politics, ideology,and fantasy, using montage and mixed media. She continues to work presently through projection and installation projects.

Her work addresses issues of representation and feminism, signification and sexual difference.and the dynamics between text and image. Her installation works are in the collections of the Arts Council of England, the British Council, Royal West of England Academy, TATE and in private collections.

Her first major solo exhibitions were in 1973 at Arnolfini Bristol and the Midland Group Gallery.Nottingam She also exhibited in many women's art shows in the 1980s contributing to curating, organising and speaking at conferences and feminist events across the country.

She studied for a BA in Fine Art at Hornsey College of Art, now Middlesex University, from 1968-1971 and in Social Anthropology at University College from 1977-79. She received a Masters in Photographic Studies from the University of Derby in 1988.

Marie Yates taught Degree Level Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, Leeds University, Chelsea School of Art, Goldsmiths College University of London, and Media at the University of the Arts London, as well as in many other Fine Art departments across the UK.

Around 1991 she retired from teaching due to ill-health and left London for Greece where she recovered and continues to work to this day (2022), exploring psychoanalysis, politics and media and embarked on the use of digital techniques to further her explorations.

She has used her personal approach to image-making combined with text and installation to achieve explorations of landscape, images of women, representation, sexual politics, and the media. Her main interest is still in how we read and respond to an image. She presents the notion of art as a social construct rather than as an object or an image-based aesthetic experience. She creates work that helps us to question meaning.

Selected Exhibitions:

2021-2 TATE Britain: Spotlights - Marie Yates -The Only Woman 1985

2018 AKTION: Conceptual Art and Photography, Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.

2018 Women Look At Women, Richard Saltoun Gallery, London.

2018 Virginia Woolf, TATE St.Ives

2017 Photo50 LondonArt Fair - Hemera Collective

2017 Looking Back to Think Forward, University of Leeds, Project Space:

2016 Some Dimensions of My Lunch: Marie Yates. Richard Saltoun Gallery, London

2016 The sun went in, the fire went out, Chelsea Space, London.

2015 Throwing Stones, Arnolfini, Bristol

^{2014 Vigilance: An Exhibition of Artists Books - Artists Space, New York}