Collection: Keith Arnatt

Keith Arnatt (1930–2008) was a British conceptual artist whose work consistently undermined the seriousness with which art presented itself. His best-known piece, Self-Burial (Television Interference Project) (1969), showed him disappearing into the ground in nine sequential photographs broadcast on German television — a deadpan dismantling of artistic presence and the conventions of the artist’s portrait. Arnatt’s practice moved between photography, text, performance documentation and institutional critique, often with a dry humour that distinguished him from the more earnest strands of British conceptualism. Later work turned to colour photography of rubbish, discarded objects and the margins of the rural landscape around his home in Wales.