LIAM GILLICK

One of the most important figures in international contemporary art, Liam Gillick works across diverse forms, including sculpture and installation. A theorist, curator 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 inform (and are informed by) his art practice. Gillick’s line of enquiry is into conditions of production, including how it continues to operate in a post-industrial landscape: questions of economy, labour and social organisation are ongoing preoccupations. He 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 standardised colours from the RAL system. These seductive materials speak the language of renovation and development: originally refined by the military, they’ve been widely used in corporate interiors since the 1990s, a decade in which post-industrial societies saw a shift from the collective to the individualist and privatised. Drawing upon engineering and industrial design as well as the legacy of hard-edged minimalism, these abstract quasi-architectural forms offer a critique of neo-liberal or corporate aesthetics, automation and endless (re)development. Focusing on secondary or incomplete forms such as screens and platforms, Gillick pinpoints structures which have a potential to destabilise the power of architecture and the architecture of power, creating generative spaces for discussion or the development of ideas.