“I am interested in secondary architecture—screens, overhead canopies, wall paneling, and so on. These architectural elements are part of a larger formal language that I deploy. I do it for a reason, and it is connected to an interest in the gray area or middle ground of the built world. These are the spaces of renovation, manipulation, compromise, and potential.”
Liam Gillick
(b. Aylesbury, United Kingdom, 1964)
Liam Gillick works across diverse forms, including sculpture and installation. A theorist, curator, filmmaker and educator as well as an artist, his wider body of work includes published essays and texts, lectures, curatorial and collaborative projects, all of which make up his art practice. Gillick is perhaps best known for producing sculptural objects—platforms, screens, models, benches, prototypes, signage, or structural supports made from sleek modular Plexiglas and aluminium forms in standardized colors. The artist often utilizes materials that resemble everyday built environments, transforming them into minimalist abstractions that deliver commentaries on social constructs such as corporate aesthetics, automation, and seemingly endless development, while also exploring what happens after modernism.
Gillick’s solo exhibitions include Gwangju Museum of Art, South Korea (2021); Madre Museum, Naples (2019); Kunsthalle, Zurich, Switzerland (2008); Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, The Netherlands (2008); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (2009). Gillick’s work is in the permanent collections of The Albright Knox Museum, Buffalo, New York; Baltimore Museum of Art, Baltimore, Maryland; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C.; Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Sweden; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois; The Museum of Modern Art, New York, New York. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, New York; Tate Modern, London; and the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao.
Gillick lives and works in New York and London.
