INSIDE/OUT: LIAM GILLICK Phantom Structures

An illustrated conversation between Liam Gillick and Mathieu Copeland on abstraction, labour, conceptual art and exhibition-as-medium.

Liam Gillick is a New York–based artist known for his contributions to sculpture, video, architecture, and text. His work focuses on the contemporary management of labour, time, and aesthetics, extended through a distinctive conception of the exhibition as a medium in its own right. His practice is divided between abstraction—based on the social and political structures of the present—and texts, films, and graphics that often appear to contradict or comment upon the apparent clarity of his constructed forms.

Rather than relying on geometry, systems, or subjective visions as in earlier periods, Gillick’s abstract works are derived from the secondary structures that emerge from an information‑based society grounded in renovation, negotiation, and discourse. A theorist, curator, and educator as well as an artist, his broader body of work includes published essays and texts, lectures, and curatorial and collaborative projects.

Gillick’s work reflects on conditions of production in a post‑industrial landscape, including the aesthetics of economy, labour, and social organization. His practice exposes the dysfunctional aspects of the modernist legacy in abstraction and architecture when framed within a globalized, neo‑liberal consensus, and extends into a structural rethinking of the exhibition as a form.

Since the late 2000s he has produced a number of short films addressing the construction of the creative persona and the mutability of the contemporary artist as a cultural figure, including Margin Time (2012), The Heavenly Lagoon (2013), and Hamilton: A Film by Liam Gillick (2014). His book Industry and Intelligence: Contemporary Art Since 1820 was published by Columbia University Press in March 2016.

Gillick’s work has been included in numerous significant international exhibitions, including documenta and the Venice, Berlin, Shanghai, and Istanbul Biennales—representing Germany at the Venice Biennale in 2009. Solo museum exhibitions have taken place at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and Tate in London. His work is held in many major public collections, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Guggenheim Museums in New York and Bilbao, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Over the past twenty‑five years, Gillick has also been a prolific writer and critic of contemporary art, contributing to Artforum, October, Frieze, and e‑flux Journal. He is the author of several books, including a volume of selected critical writings. High‑profile public commissions include the British Government’s Home Office (Interior Ministry) building in London and the Lufthansa Headquarters in Frankfurt.

Throughout this period, Gillick has extended his practice into experimental venues and collaborative projects with artists such as Philippe Parreno, Lawrence Weiner, Louise Lawler, Adam Pendleton, and the band New Order, with whom he worked on a series of concerts in Manchester, Turin, and Vienna.

The INSIDE/OUT public programme of lectures invites speakers and leading thinkers whose breadth of work, practice, thought and collaboration we feel will inspire all our students and staff across the wide range of disciplines in the Leeds School of Arts.

Please visit LEEDS ART GALLERY – current exhibitions include Mike Nelson: M62 (East, West) | Plant Dreaming, an exhibition of works on plants, and their real and imagined histories until 19 April 2026 | Some Steel: Sculpture and Steel in Britain, 1960-90, an exhibition tracing the relationship between sculpture and steel over a period of thirty years.