Gary Hill (b. 1951, Santa Monica, CA) is an interdisciplinary artist and has worked with sculpture, sound, video, written and spoken text, installation and performance. Since the early seventies he has remained committed to an experimental practice in dialogue with an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity.
Exhibitions of his work have been presented at museums and institutions worldwide, including solo exhibitions at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain (Paris); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Centre Georges Pompidou (Paris); Guggenheim Museum, (New York); The Henry Art Gallery (Seattle); Museum für Gegenwartskunst (Basel); Museu d’Art Contemporani (Barcelona); and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Museum of Contemporary Art (Los Angeles); MIS – Museu da Imagem e do Som (São Paulo); Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal; Center for Contemporary Art, (Tel Aviv). Commissioned projects include works for the Science Museum in London and the Seattle Central Public Library in Seattle, and an installation and performance work for the Colosseum and Temple of Venus in Rome. Hill has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations, and has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, most notably the Leone d’Oro Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale (1995), a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award (1998), the Kurt-Schwitters-Preis (2000), and honorary degrees from The Academy of Fine Arts Poznan, Poland (2005) and Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle (2011). He was awarded the Genius Award in Film by The Stranger, Seattle (2011).
The solo exhibition “Always rings twice”, along with conversation program, was dedicated to Gary Hill by the West Museumkwartier in Den Haag, in 2018. The same year, his large solo show “Linguistic Spill in the Boiler Hall,” took place at MAAT (Museum of Art, Architecture & Technology) in Lisbon. In October 2018 a solo exhibition of selected single-channel video works was held at Total Museum of Contemporary Art (TMCA) in Seoul.
An extensive survey exhibition “Gary Hill: Momentombs,” including installations, sculpture and single-channel video works was presented at Suwon Museum of Art, Suwon, Korea in November 2019. In 2020, the museum publishes Momentombs, a bilingual (English/Korean) catalogue documenting the artist's major exhibition, with texts and interviews. In 2021, You Know Where I'm At and I Know Where You're At is published, a 128-page colour book written and illustrated by the artist with letters and drawings by Martin Cothren, a Native American Yakama. The two artists embark on a 20-year correspondence across cultural and creative boundaries as part of the Encounters series produced by Dis Voir, Paris. In 2022 Hill began a new mixed media series entitled The Engender Project, consisting of sculpture, silkscreen, watercolour and painting.
Electric Op is the first major exhibition to examine how the Op art of the 1960s and 1970s related to not only industrial machinery, but also the new electronic media of the dawning post-industrial era. At the very moment that Op artists began making works that short-circuit our optical systems,
Gary Hill has tagged the exhibition Loop Through, referring to a singular work as well as being suggestive of a path or circuit from which to experience the selected works.His multimedia installations, performances and video works incorporate a wide range of materials and technologies, along with diverse linguistic concerns. From
Mitchell Art Museum at St. John’s College, Annapolis, Maryland, USA. In the 1960s, happenings, minimalism, and performance art contributed to introducing the concept of time into contemporary art. However, it was not until artists began to experiment with technology, utilising instruments such as computers, Kodak Super 8 cameras, and Sony
Continuing with a thread of works that comingle language, memory and vision between extremities of light and darkness (Midnight Crossing, 1997 and The Storyteller’s Room, 1998, The Slow Torque of Bonsai, 2017), Afterwards will utilize considerably more found objects—debris, surplus, cast out furnishings, tools etc. that are consciously setup to generate overlapping
The Herzog Anton Ulrich Museum is hosting, in collaboration with the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Gary Hill’s “Bemerkungen über die Farben” (Remarks On Color, 1944): a video installation included within the exhibition “Juxtaposed”. The aim of the exhibition is to present works of art from the past, including masterpieces from Rembrandt, Rubens
In Circular Breathing, there is the sense of a disturbing narrative accumulating and dissipating through each successive set of scenes. Images from the streets of Tangier, a ship on the open sea and the interior of a mosque juxtapose with a man chopping wood and a cigarette burning slowly in
