Biography
Stephan Willats (b. London, UK 1943) is a conceptual artist and sculptor who studied at Ealing School of Art (1962–3) and began editing and publishing Control Magazine in 1965 (a set of which is at Wolverhampton Art Gallery). In 1972–3 Willats was the Director of the Centre for Behavioural Art in London, working on collaborative research-based projects, promulgating art as an intervention of social patterns of interaction, conflict and identities. Light Modulator No. 2 (1962) was a project for an outdoor public sculpture made of moving vertical panels, perspex and painted wood, through which people would pass. The Social Resource Project for Tennis Clubs (1972), exhibited at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London in 1999, was developed from a series of questionnaires for clubs in Nottingham aimed ultimately at redesigning the game of tennis to reflect more accurately what participants hoped to derive from their visits. The Whitworth, Manchester, Wolverhampton Art Gallery and the National Gallery of Austrlia, Canberra hold examples of his work, donated by the Contemporary Art Society.
