Occupation visual artist Spouse(s) Lucia Pizzani | Name Jaime Gili Role Artist | |
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In Conversation With Jaime Gili
Jaime Gili (born 1972, Caracas from Catalan parents) is an artist based in London since 1996.
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Throughout his career, Jaime Gili has developed the universal abstract language of the mid-20th Century into contemporary painting. More specifically, his work has been contextualised as a revision of Latin American abstraction, especially the Venezuelan optical and kinetic work of artists such as Carlos Cruz-Diez and Alejandro Otero, with an input from popular art and London's energy.
Critic Fisun Guner wrote in 2003 about his show at the Jerwood Space: "What do you get when you mix Pop Art, Minimalism, Vorticism, Futurism and graffiti art? The answer may well resemble the work of (...) Jaime Gili." Venezuelan Curator Jesús Fuenmayor wrote in 2006 for the catalogue of Gili's show at Periférico Caracas that his paintings were "as if someone had thrown a bomb at a work by Carlos Cruz-Diez". Swiss curator Oliver Kielmayer, wrote in 2009 "Jaime Gili seems to combine the wilderness of the jungle with a formalist and reductionist artistic language; the result is a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, a crystalline pulsating organism that almost comes alive."
Gili received his MA in painting from the Royal College of Art in 1998, after studying in Caracas and Barcelona. He completed a PhD at the University of Barcelona in 2001 with a thesis on "Repetition and Serial art since the 1960's". He has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including '6 Bienal do Mercosul' in Porto Alegre; 'Expander' at the Royal Academy of Arts in London; 'Las tres calaveras' at Periferico Caracas in Caracas; 'Jump Cuts' at CIFO in Miami; 'The Complex of Respect' at Kunsthalle Bern; "Bill at Pittier" at Kunsthalle Winterthur and 'Indica', a show recreating the 1960s Indica Gallery at Riflemaker in London.
Apart from his exhibitions, which have recently happened mainly in Miami, Caracas and London, he has also been invited to make several permanent works integrated into architecture. In Venezuela he completed "Diamante de las Semillitas", a work in Petare, a very high density informal city with a colonial core in the East of Caracas. He was also chosen to create a site-specific design for 16 large industrial storage tanks, in what would become one of the world's largest public art projects 260,000 square feet (24,000 m2). Entitled "Art All Around", the event and work was produced by Maine Center for Creativity. The site is located along the Fore River in South Portland, Maine.