Liam Gillick

Liam Gillick (born 1964 in Aylesbury, Great Britain, lives and works in London and New York) works in a whole range of different media. His art does not simply consist of spacious installations, graphically complex texts and minimalist objects. He also publishes full-length books, composes film music, arranges exhibitions and produces architectural designs. The “parallelism” of his work is crucial. On the one hand his projects are “free artistic expression”; on the other, they are “applied art”, apparently with a clearly defined practical purpose.
Between the two spheres of activity, he creates for himself a space for discourse on a wide variety of subjects. Gillick’s aesthetic philosophy transcends the separation between pure theory and simple practicality, and that between poetic fiction and empirical fact. Gillick uses the forms and the materials of abstract art and of the Minimal Art of the sixties as tools to show up to which degree our worldwide economic system has become even more abstract than the art of
the same name. The title of the work shown here is the same as a large exhibition at the Palais de Tokyo, Paris and La Caas Encendida, Madrid in 2005. Both these exhibitions and the door relate to a work in progress – a lengthy text structure that focuses on post-industrial developments in consensus based European cultures. The door is a reference to a moment in the text when the former workers in a now-closed Swedish car factory return to their former workplace and rearrange the signage and information in order to create a new architecture of desire and refusal.