Tina Gillen, painting teacher and artistic researcher at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, represents the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg at the 59th Biennale di Venezia (23 Apr – 27 Nov 2022).
The project ‘Faraway So Close’ by Tina Gillen (b. 1972 in Luxembourg), developed by Mudam Luxembourg, is an ambitious painting installation made especially for the Luxembourg Pavilion.
Although rooted in painting, and acutely conscious of its traditions, Tina Gillen’s work brings this discipline into contact with other media, such as photography, sculpture, installation and cinema. Her paintings often use images from everyday life as their starting point, reworking and combining them within compositions that maintain a degree of ambiguity, between abstraction and figuration, construction and improvisation. Her most recent work departs from the traditional framework of the canvas to explore the relationship between the pictorial surface and three-dimensional space.
‘Faraway So Close’ is intended as a tableau vivant for the Luxembourg Pavilion that reflects on the relationship between inner space and the outside world. It takes form within a specially conceived exhibition design inspired by painted film sets and explores many of the themes running through Gillen’s work, including architecture, landscape and the relationship between abstraction and figuration. It will also inaugurate new site-specific paintings and other works conceived in dialogue with the historic setting of the Sale d’Armi in the Arsenale.
Research project at Academy
The exhibition is accompanied by the long-term research project ‘Forms of Life’, conducted at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, by Tina Gillen, Christophe Gallois, and a group of students and young artists. The research project takes shape, among others, as a monthly seminar at the Academy and a workshop in Venice at the start of September 2022. Initiated in 2021, ‘Forms of Life’ will culminate in a project at Mudam in the summer of 2023.