b.1940, Durban; d.2020, New York

“Conceptual art is not about ideas,” the late Ian Wilson wrote. “It is about the degree of abstraction of ideas.” Wilson left South Africa in 1960 when he was twenty years old. He became a contemporary of Joseph Kosuth, Art & Language, and Lawrence Weiner. “If you have one more of those invisible artists out here, you’re fired,” John Baldessari recounted Paul Brach having said after Baldessari invited Ian Wilson to the Cal Arts visiting artist programme. Ian Wilson was pivotal in the dematerialisation of the art object, which marked the final chapter of the modernist narrative. Unlike his fellow Conceptualists, however, his intrigues were primarily mystical; the artist pursuing an unmediated truth. “The heart of consciousness is a state of being which is formless,” Wilson said with sage-like opacity. An art of concepts, he believed, was necessarily without matter, belonging not to physical space but to the province of the mind. This was non-objective art taken to its final form; thought without corresponding sign. From 1968, the artist began mentioning the word ‘time’ in a series of informal interactions, curious to see what might arise.