Portrait of the artist’s inner me

This mainly new body of work by Mark Wallinger is spread across two capacious “white space” venues 70 miles apart. At its centre is the notion of ‘I’. The first-person pronoun. Capitalised, columnar, a signifier of the self, the ego — me.

An extensive group of new, large-scale paintings (collectively entitled Id), which spans both galleries, makes this theme direct and confrontational.

Wallinger, who was born in 1959 and is based in London, represented Britain in the Venice Biennale in 2001 and won the Turner Prize in 2007. So he might have good reason to be egotistical. In reality, he is quiet and contemplative. To associate his work generally, and these works in particular, with egotism, would be to miss the point.

They take as their point of departure the notion of the self, an essential component in defining identity and personality. Wallinger is acutely aware of the edifice of psychological and critical theory around such ideas, and he plays with these, alternately questioning and referencing them.

The Id paintings (the pun on Id — identity — is a given) reference Da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, the work of Yves Klein, as well as Rorschach ink blots. In essence, these are a form of symmetrical painting, created by the direct hand application of black acrylic paint. The work is direct and bold. Like many brilliant ideas, it seems obvious once conceived. They are a record of their own making, as well as a form of self-portraiture.

Elsewhere, Wallinger explores “the self” through typography — a large number of capitalised “I” letters in different fonts and in varying stages of composition fill the walls of the Edinburgh venue. An installation of 100 chairs, each attached to a single point on a wall by twine, makes use of the artist’s name (on the back of each chair is written: MARK). Two small tondo-style photographs of human skin create a subtler self-reference. Respectively titled Venus and Mars, these face each other over the large Dundee Contemporary Arts gallery space. The work is about love and the complementary nature of human relationships but it also alludes to the Latin origin of the artist’s name.

With work ranging from the monumental to the intimate, this show is at once absorbing and genuinely novel. It underlines Wallinger’s place as a major figure on the international art scene and combines spectacle, humour and meaty philosophical fodder.

Until 4 June