Keith Tyson was born in Ulverston, Cumbria and studied fine art at Carlisle College of Art from 1989-90, after completing a course in mechanical engineering studies. He completed an MA in Alternative Practice at the University of Brighton in 1993, and his first solo exhibition, From the Artmachine, was at the Anthony Reynolds Gallery in 1995.

Since then, Tyson has exhibited across Europe and the USA. He has represented the UK at the Sao Paulo Bienal; his sculpture The Thinker (After Rodin) was shown to great acclaim at the 2001 Venice Biennale as part of the installation Drawing and Thinking; and in 2002 he won the prestigious Turner Prize.

Keith Tyson’s work is influenced by his pursuit of knowledge, and his fascination with scientific concepts and philosophical theories as a means of exploring the universe. Chance also plays a crucial part in his work. This leads to complex and engaging studio drawings, as well as unusual games, objects or machines, which comment on human existence while demonstrating the artist’s sense of playfulness. Artmachine, for example, used a methodology into which raw data was fed, and from which completely unpredictable, random artistic proposals were generated – an attempt by the artist to eliminate all sense of autobiography from his work.

Tullie House presents, for the first time in the UK, Keith Tyson’s Nature Paintings. Selected from a series of more than 100 paintings, these works apparently originated in the primal scene of a burglary at Tyson’s studio. Various paints were mixed together by pure chance and, applied to aluminium, the outcome was a remarkable diffusion of colours. The beauty of these paintings’ compositions and the ideas they conjure of the cosmos is an accidental one. These paintings are innocent, existing ‘beyond beautiful and ugly’ and Tyson refuses to bestow certain meaning upon them. “I’m interested”, he says, “in putting a conundrum on the wall, something that resonates and asks questions… I just don’t have a cerebral manifesto of what I’m doing. I’ve always maintained that when I don’t know what I’m doing my work is apt to be interesting and alive.” Nature Paintings also includes an exciting series of new work exploring the taxonomy of nature developed specifically for Tullie House and never before exhibited.