Wallinger, Mark (1959– )

English artist. His mostly conceptual works focus on themes of class, national identity, religion, and politics. He is best known for his sculpture Ecce Homo (1999), a representation of Jesus that occupied Trafalgar Square's vacant Fourth Plinth for nearly a year. He won the 2007 Turner Prize for his installation State Britain, a replica of one man's anti-Iraq War protest site at Parliament Square in London.

Other works include The Sleeper (2004), a two and a half hour video of the artist dressed in a bear suit wandering around a deserted art gallery in Berlin. It was this work he showed on his Turner Prize award night at Tate Liverpool. State Britain, installed at Tate Britain, recreates more than 600 banners, signs, and photographs as well as the makeshift shelter of Brian Haw, an antiwar activist who occupied a kerbside at Parliament Square from 2001 until he was forcibly removed by police in 2006.

Wallinger was born in Chigwell, Essex, and studied art at Chelsea School of Art and Goldsmiths College in London. His work was included in several exhibitions during the 1990s, for example ‘Young British Artists II’ at the Charles Saatchi gallery (1993) and ‘Sensation’ at the Royal Academy (1997). He went on to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale in 2001. He was first nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, when he lost to Damien Hirst.