Stephen Willats: Silent Influencer

“My works do not tell you how to think, they are conceived of as a tool for formulating your own vision of your relationship with other people and with society. They present another way in which an artwork transmits modern understandings of how people relate to each other and the society between them. The outcome I want is for the work to encourage lateral thinking on the part of the viewer and to make new connections with the world around them.”

• Stephen Willats

Charim is pleased to present Silent Influencer, the second solo exhibition at the gallery by Stephen Willats, following Transition Transform (2024), and his earlier inclusion in the group exhibition Sleeping Producers (2014).

Silent Influencer brings together a selection of works from the past decade, many presented here for the first time, including recent diagrammatic works mapping networks of social relations within London’s financial district. These works examine the built environment of the contemporary city as an active agent that silently conditions perception, behaviour, and interpersonal dynamics. The exhibition considers how the material presence of architecture - its scale, density, and apparent neutrality - exerts a subliminal influence on individual consciousness. Through an interplay of graphical, pictorial, and textual elements, Willats constructs systems that invite viewers to trace connections, interpret relationships, and actively participate in meaning-making. Exhibited wall-based works, panels and film function as open frameworks through which viewers may reconsider their position within broader social structures.

A pioneer of conceptual art active since the 1960s, Willats has developed a practice grounded in the study of communication and informed by the principles of cybernetics. Working across diagrammatic structures, films, and conceptual models, his work consistently shifts emphasis away from the art object toward the social systems in which it operates, concerned with the “fabric of society”: the invisible networks and behavioural frameworks that shape human interaction.

Recent institutional exhibitions include: Wohnkomplex: Kunst und Leben in Plattenbau, Das Minsk Kunsthaus, Potsdam (2026); What does he want to get at/ Where does he want to go, National Portrait Gallery, London (2025); Leigh Bowery!, Tate Modern (2025); Echos du passé, promesses du futur, Univers Programmés, Musee d”Art Contemporain, Lyon, France (2025); Electric Dreams, Art Before the Internet, Tate, London (2024) among others. Selected solo exhibitions include Transition Transform, Charim Galerie, Vienna (2024); Time Tumbler, Victoria Miro, London (2023); The Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs, Bonington Gallery, Nottingham Trent University, Nottingham (2022); Languages of Dissent, Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich (2019); Control, Tate Liverpool, Liverpool (2018); Human Right, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough (2017); THISWAY - Stephen Willats, Index, Stockholm (2016); Man from the 21st Century, Museo Tamayo, Mexico City (2015); Wie die Welt ist und wie sie sein könnte, Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, Siegen (2006); and Meta Filter and Related Works, Tate Gallery, London (1982); Concerning Our Present Way of Living, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1979); and Concerning Our Present Way of Living, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (1980); 4 Inseln in Berlin, Secession, Vienna (1981).

His work is held in numerous public collections, including Tate, London; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The British Museum, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Kunstmuseum Zürich; Migros Museum, Zürich; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; and Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris.

The artist will be present at the opening on 19 May.