Liam Gillick: Were People This Dumb Before TV? Grafische Arbeit 1990-2016

Esther Schipper is pleased to announce Liam Gillick’s ninth solo exhibition with the gallery. Titled Were People This Dumb Before TV? Grafische Arbeit 1990-2016, the exhibition gives a comprehensive overview of an important part of Gillick’s work. Since 1990 the artist has produced a wide range of graphic material, including prints, posters, books, magazine covers and inserts, invitation cards (both for his own exhibitions and those of others), maps, logos and identities, both for public institutions and commercial art galleries. Conceived as a living archive, in addition to new and existing editions, the exhibition will create a set of reference prints of lost or difficult to source works.

Including more or less oblique references to the major research projects that have fueled Gillick’s work, among them McNamara, Erasmus is Late, Literally No Place, Construcción de Uno, A Volvo Bar and Why Work?, these projects have constituted an integral element of the artist’s critical position. Starting in the early 1990s he has focused upon the aesthetics of ideological control systems rooted in the development of a client citizenry. He plays with the codes that have placed us into a set of relationships with the managed state and precipitated multiple layers of disenfranchisement. Radically contingent and contextual, the references can be textual or graphic—picking up for example on the use of pattern or diagrams in corporate settings and thereby addressing the dysfunctional aspects of the modernist legacy as it has been deployed over the last thirty years.

The exhibition structure is derived from the artists recollection of the Vienna apartment in the lane Stoß im Himmel that he often borrowed in the 1990s and early 2000s. This memory space serves as a central structuring element within the exhibition space and an appropriate presentation device echoing the informal locations where much of this material was conceived and produced.