Background
Liam Gillick was born in 1964 in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom.
Liam Gillick was born in 1964 in Aylesbury, Buckinghamshire, United Kingdom.
Liam Gillick graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1987 with a degree in fine art.
Liam's first solo exhibition took place in 1989. For a period of time in the 1990s, Gillick was a member of the band Soho. As a visual artist, he has worked in a variety of media, including sculpture, print, architecture, graphic design, film, and music. In 1991, together with art collector, and co-publisher of Art Monthly, Jack Wendler, Gillick founded the limited editions and publishing company G-W Press. Together with Damien Hirst, Sarah Lucas, Angela Bulloch and Henry Bond, he was "the earliest of the YBAs" — the Young British Artists who dominated British art during the 1990s.
Gillick traveled to Japan in 2000, and was a guest professor at the CCA Research Project. While there, he used benches, tables, bookshelves, and Japanese lanterns to decorate the common area. Not long after, he was commissioned to sculpt a new piece for the court outside the Clore Gallery, which he did using benches, tables, shelves, and lighting. His large architectural pieces often have an industrial quality, including "Local Discussion Screen", which features bright red panels attached to a metal framework. In 2002, the artist was featured in his first major solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in London. The exhibition showcased many wooden pieces, including a life-sized maze.
That same year, Gillick was nominated for the Turner Prize for a ceiling display comprised of colorful glass and acrylic sheets. He also works in print, and was commissioned to design a series of posters for the London Underground Platform for Art program and the Frieze Art Fair. In 2007, the London Underground hired the artist to design the cover for a map of the railway system. Titled "The Day Before", the cover art features a date one day before the Underground began operating. It is written in 12 distinct colors, which represent the 12 rail lines. In 2009, Gillick represented Germany in the Giardini Pavilions of the Venice Biennale. In October 2010, Liam joined fellow artists in protesting cuts in public funding for the arts. He composed a score for the film "Beijing", and contributed a recipe to Ryan Gander’s art project "Ryan’s Bar". He has also contributed to magazines and journals such as Frieze, Artforum, and October. He currently lives and works in New York City, where he serves on the faculty of Columbia University’s School of the Arts.
How can quantum gravity help explain the origin of the universe? (Belfast Mural)
Yokohama Triennale Instalation
Big Conference Platform Platform
Annlee You Proposes
A Kitchen Cat Speaks (Installation in the German Pavilion)
Provisional Bar Floor/Ceiling
Returning to an Abandoned Plant
Liaison Structure
Rescinded Production
Pinboard Prototype #1 (Milan House Project)
Young British Artist Liam Gillick is primarily interested in analyzing structures, social organizations, and human interaction. An early practitioner of Relational Aesthetics, Gillick's cross-disciplinary practice also comprises music composition, writing, and curatorial projects.
In the early 1990s, Gillick along with Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas became a part of what is known as the Young British Artists group. Gillick is a member of the Graduate Committee of the Center for Curatorial Studies and Art in Contemporary Culture at Bard College. Since 2017, he has also been a founding member of The American Friends of the ICA, a support group for the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
Quotes from others about the person
Gillick's practice to date has encompassed a wide range of media and activities (including sculpture, writing, architectural and graphic design, film, and music) as well as various critical and curatorial projects, his work as a whole is also marked by a fondness for diversions and distractions, tangents and evasions."
"Artists such as Liam Gillick ... no longer address abstraction as the principle for the creation of distinct minimalist objects, but rather try to create through design spaces for open social interaction [artworks] whose actual use is to be constantly redefined within the situation of the exhibition - without necessarily producing relational-aesthetic models of community.
Liam was married to fellow artist Sarah Morris, in 1998 at a ceremony in Miami, but they divorced in 2012.
