GARY HILL

Gary Hill (b. 1951, Santa Monica, CA) has worked with a broad range of media – including sculpture, sound, video, installation and performance – since the early 1970’s, producing a large body of single-channel videos, mixed-media installations, and performance work. His longtime work with intermedia continues to explore 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 SoHo, New York; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Museu d’Art Contemporani, Barcelona; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg; Center for Contemorary Art, Tel Aviv; West Den Haag, Den Haag and most recently at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), Lisbon and the Suwon Art Museum, Suwon, Korea.

Hill has completed a number of commissioned works including the permanent installations, HanD HearD-Variation for the Science Museum in London and Astronomy by Day (and other oxymoron) for the new Seattle Public Library designed by Rem Koolhaas. Following a two-week trip to a Yanomami village in Brazil, he produced Impressions d’Afrique for the exhibition, “Yanomami: l’esprit de la forêt,” at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, Paris.

He has also worked collaboratively with a number of artists most notably, George Quasha and Charles Stein producing the publication, An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works & Writings. In 1998 he collaborated with the choreographer meg Stuart and her dance company ‘Damaged Goods’ to produce Splayed Mind Out which was performed more than 50 times in Europe, South America and the United States.

In 2005 Hill was Commissioned by the Soprintendenza Archeologica di Roma to produce Resounding Arches / Archi Risonanti, an installation of multiple projections with sound, for the Colosseum and Temple of Venus and Roma, which was the first contemporary art work to be created for the site.  The event culminated with the performance, Dark Resonances, in collaboration with Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson and Charles Stein.

In 2008 he was Commissioned by the Holland Festival to collaborate on the production of “Varèse 360°,” a two-night concert of the composer Edgard Varèse’s complete works, presented at the Westergasfabriek Gashouder, Amsterdam, and at Salle Pleyel, Paris, in 2009. Hill Developed the dramaturgy and visual component for the entirety of the performance and invited further collaboration with performers Christelle Fillod, George Quasha, Els Van Riel, Charles Stein and costume design by Paulina Wallenberg-Olsson. 2013 saw his opera directorial debut at the Lyon Opera House interweaving Beethoven’s Fidelio with the science fiction novel Aniara.

Hill’s recent gallery and museum exhibitions have focused on his life long interest in and influence of psychotropic experiences: of surf, death, tropes & tableaux: The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment, premiered at the Barbara Gladstone (2011); Gary Hill: glossodelic attractors, an extensive survey exhibition at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle (2012); Cutting Corners Creates More Sides, recently exhibited at bitforms gallery in New york (2019). In 2018 the open-ended series Linguistic Spill was exhibited at the Museum of Art, Architecture and Technology (MAAT), Ars Electronica in Linz and in Seattle at the Center on Contemporary Arts. "Momentombs," a large survey exhibition with over 40 works accompanied by a 221 page catalog with texts and interview was shown at the Suwon Art museum in Suwon, Korea (2020)

He has received multiple 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 doctorate degrees from The Academy of Fine Arts Poznan, Poland (2005) and Cornish College of the Arts, Seattle (2011).