Tina Gillen - Flying Mercury
Tina Gillen - Flying Mercury
Since the 1990s, the Luxembourg artist Tina Gillen has worked the major themes of landscapes and dwellings to develop a visual language that examines the relationship between the individual and the world around them. In the course of her travels she has used the medium of photography to build up a bank of images that she complements with notes on different subjects and visuals collected from different iconographic sources (e.g. magazines, postcards, films, documentaries, old works). Tina Gillen extracts certain fragments from this inventory, simplifying them pictorially, subtracting or combining them with others to piece together an image that speaks to her time, interrogating its power and the complex relationship between reality and representation. These compositions navigate between abstraction and figuration, between the constructed world and the natural environment, between interior and exterior, between the pictorial act and the rigour of the stroke, between the treatment of the canvas and crafting the volume of the subject. The ambivalent generated by these works is all the more reinforced by the subtle interplay of scales and perspectives, the repetition of forms, treatment of colours, formats and materials. Tina Gillen plunges her subjects into worlds of tension, inviting visitors into largely motionless atmospheres that are conducive to observation and interrogation.
In collaboration with the curator, Tina Guillen was invited to design an exhibition that relates to her work and to take charge the scenographic presentation of this project, with due regard for the architectural constraints of the spaces dedicated to it. In a dialogue between new productions and older works, the selection of some thirty pieces is a testament to Tina Gillen's artistic practice over the last 20 years. Located on the first levels of the Konschthal in resonance with her different themes, the presentation imagined for this collaboration is in line with her continued research into the representation of landscape in the Anthropocene era.
BIOGRAPHY
Tina Gillen (Luxembourg, 1972) lives and works in Brussels. She is represented by the Nosbaum Reding Gallery, Luxembourg and Brussels. Her "Faraway So Close" project represented Luxembourg at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.
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