Liam Gillick and Alan Charlton Exhibit Geometric Dialogue

3 hours ago7 min read3 comments

The Alfonso Artiaco gallery becomes a stage for a profound dialogue between generations, where Liam Gillick's sleek, architecturally-infused installations engage in a silent, powerful conversation with Alan Charlton's meditative gray monochromes. This isn't merely a hanging of works side-by-side; it's a curated collision of two distinct philosophies of minimalism, a masterclass in how restraint can scream volumes.Gillick, ever the conceptual provocateur, employs anodized aluminum, saturated color, and fragmented textual elements to probe the structures of our late-capitalist world, his work functioning like a corporate aesthetic stripped bare to reveal its ideological skeleton. His pieces are questions posed in three dimensions, interrogating the spaces between art, architecture, and the flow of global capital.Charlton, by contrast, offers a response not through expansion but through profound reduction. For decades, his singular focus has been the color gray and the canvas format, yet within this self-imposed limitation lies an infinite universe of texture, tone, and spatial illusion.His paintings are not mere surfaces; they are events of perception, where the subtle interplay of light on meticulously applied brushstrokes causes the flat plane to breathe, recede, and advance, challenging the viewer's very sense of depth and solidity. The genius of this exhibition lies in the friction and resonance between these approaches: Gillick's work speaks the language of the social and the systemic, while Charlton's whispers the language of the phenomenological and the sublime.One can trace Gillick's lineage back to the conceptualism of the 1990s, where art dissolved into the realm of ideas and social critique, while Charlton stands as a stalwart of the 1970s post-minimalist generation, a peer of figures like Robert Ryman, who similarly dedicated their practice to investigating the fundamental components of painting itself. To witness a Gillick construction—perhaps a suspended platform or a fragmented text panel in a vibrant, almost industrial hue—positioned near a vast, quietly humming Charlton canvas is to see two different answers to the same eternal question: how can form contain meaning? The gallery space itself becomes an interlocutor, with the white cube architecture mediating this geometric duel.This exhibition does more than showcase two great artists; it frames a critical art historical narrative, demonstrating how the legacy of modernism and minimalism continues to evolve and find new relevance. It’s a show that demands slow looking, rewarding the patient observer with a deep understanding of how two masters, through a shared vocabulary of line, plane, and color, can articulate vastly different, yet equally compelling, visions of the world.

#featured

#Liam Gillick

#Alan Charlton

#Alfonso Artiaco

#geometry

#art exhibition

#gallery show

#contemporary art

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