DUBLIN.- À bientôt, j’espère… presents an array of archetypal abstract works by Liam Gillick, alongside a revisiting of his work relating to the French film collective Groupe Medvedkine (1967–1974)

Since the 1990s, Gillick’s abstract work has drawn upon the visual language of renovation, recuperation and re-occupation. He absorbs the aesthetics of neo-liberalism, which restage the remnants and surfaces of modernism as in the production of false ceilings, cladding systems and walls dividers. For Gillick, car production and kitchen design remain the two shadows cast when the aesthetics of advanced technology mask the failure of the modernist project and have been at the centre of a number of key works and exhibitions, including the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009.

Alongside this is a focus upon the rise contemporary artist as a compromised figure, emerging alongside the collapse in traditional mass production in the Global North and the displacement of production away from the sites of consumption. Gillick’s general approach does not attempt to resolve the contradictions between his search for contemporary forms of abstraction and his critical texts, films and exhibition structures that often expose its implicated ideological underpinnings.

Liam Gillick
b. 1964, Aylesbury, England. Lives and works in New York

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 the potential to destabilise the power of architecture and the architecture of power, creating generative spaces for discussion or the development of ideas.

Liam Gillick has had solo exhibitions in many of the world’s leading museums, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Pergamon Museum, Berlin; Kunsthalle Zürich; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Witte de With, Rotterdam; Kunst-und Ausstellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland, Bonn; Sankt Peter, Cologne; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Kunsthaus Zürich; MAGASIN, Grenoble; Madre Museum, Naples; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Tate Britain, London; IMMA, Dublin; Potter Museum, Melbourne and Gwangju Museum of Art, Korea. Gillick has participated in major international exhibitions including Okayama Art Summit, Japan and the Venice, Shanghai, Istanbul and Yinchuan biennales.