For Frieze New York 2022, Casey Kaplan is pleased to present No No Place, a site-specific installation of works by Liam Gillick, spanning 2008 - 2020.
Central to the artist’s practice is an unfixed studio location, in which Gillick conceives of his sculptures in the form of computer renderings often years prior to fabrication. In this way, Gillick’s oeuvre exists in a non-place, where multiple projects are born concurrently from an overlapping collection of concepts—like simultaneously running program windows on a computer screen. For Frieze New York 2022, Gillick has escalated this larger ethos of his practice by aggregating works from contexts spanning more than a decade into a single experience, invoking new parallel realities of coexistence. At the presentation’s core is a collapse of time and location, exemplified by a diagram of bisecting floorplans, either of accomplished or merely conceptualized exhibitions, that houses new work digitally, within.
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Diagram: overlaid floor plans of spaces in which the artist has both exhibited and developed work digitally, courtesy Liam Gillick.
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Liam Gillick
Liquid Production, 2008
Powder coated aluminum
28 elements: 78.74 x 1.18 x 5.91" / 200 x 3 x 15cm each
Installation: 78.74 x 75.59 x 5.91" / 200 x 192 x 15cm
For more than three decades, Gillick has examined behaviors influenced by the built environment. The artist utilizes materials that have forged the visual identity of the constructed world, transforming them into abstractions that examine the tensions between function and aesthetics in applied minimalism and corporate design. No No Place is comprised of a suite of structures produced from Plexiglas and powder-coated aluminum; materials often used in commercial architecture. Aluminum and Plexiglas are building materials heavily associated with the 20th century. Utilized by corporations and militaries alike, they are the mediums of riot shields and McDonald’s signs. For the artist, they are loaded materials from our immediate past.
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Installed as a group, Gillick’s works guide the viewer, engaging us in multi-modeled universe. Gillick's “discussion platforms” are fragments of suspended ceilings that act like canopies, such as Protected Platform (2016), which subliminally invites the congregation of bodies beneath.
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Liam Gillick
Protected Platform, 2016
Powder coated aluminum, Plexiglass
96.46 x 47.24 x 47.24" / 245 x 120 x 120cm
LG2016-007
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Liam Gillick
Expanded Limitation, 2015
Powder coated aluminum
14 elements: 39.37 x 1.18 x 3.94" / 100 x 3 x 10cm each
Installation: 39.37 x 52.36 x 3.94" / 100 x 133 x 10cm
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Liam Gillick
Directed Screen, 2020
Powder coated aluminum
78.74 x 39.37 x 2.76" / 200 x 100 x 7cm
LG2020-012
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Liam Gillick
Framed Projection, 2010
Powder coated aluminum, Plexiglass
19.69 x 7.87 x 3.94" / 50 x 20 x 10cm
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Liam Gillick
Refracted Production, 2010
Powder coated aluminum, Plexiglass
19.69 x 5.91 x 3.94" / 50 x 15 x 10cm
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Liam Gillick
Defined Production, 2008
Powder coated aluminum
40 elements: 76.77 x 1.18 x 3.94" / 195 x 3 x 10cm each
Installation: 76.77 x 154.72 x 3.94" / 195 x 393 x 10cm
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Liam Gillick
Hindered Development, 2013
Powder coated aluminum
5.91 x 39.37 x 5.91” / 15 x 100 x 15cm
Wall-based works, termed “units,” like Hindered Development (2013), are rectangular abstractions made of joined pieces of vibrant powdered aluminum. The works conform to elements observed in contemporary spaces born from minimalism: clean lines, balanced compositions, emphasis on material, and a lack of adornment.
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Among the structures, we become part of a translucent constellation of overlapped interactions with each component, both in situ—within the placeless vacuum of the installation—as well as in future or past interactions with the work, elsewhere. Listed Screen (2016), a free-standing “wall-screen” leverages the materiality of violet Plexiglas to provide visual access while blocking physical entry. With this non-functional middle space, the artwork maintains an elusive quality, persistently asking “What if?” while refuting a definitive answer. Acutely self-aware, but without irony or cynicism, the work parodies the perpetual speculation of corporate culture, and its obsession with the illusion of progress.
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Liam Gillick
Listed Screen, 2016
Powder coated aluminum, Plexiglass
90.55 x 11.81 x 7.87" / 230 x 30 x 20cm
Liam Gillick lives in New York. His work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions internationally, at institutions such as: Madre Museum, Naples; Kunsthalle Wien, Vienna; Contemporary Art Centre, Vilnius; Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto; Le Magasin, Grenoble; Hessel Museum of Art, Bard College, New York; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and Gwangju Museum of Art, Gwangju among many others. Gillick has participated in documenta, and the Venice, Berlin and Istanbul Biennales - representing Germany in 2009 in Venice. A prolific writer and critic of contemporary art over the last twenty-five years, Gillick has contributed to publications such as Artforum, October, Frieze and e-flux Journal. He is the author of a number of books, including a volume of his selected critical writing and the recently-published Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820 (Columbia University Press, March 2016). Additionally, Gillick has produced a number of short films since the late 2000s, which address the construction of the creative persona in light of the enduring mutability of the contemporary artist as a cultural figure. High-profile public works include the British Government Home Office (Interior Ministry) building in London and the Lufthansa Headquarters in Frankfurt. His work can be found in institutional collections such as Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York and Bilbao; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, Porto.
