Tina Gillen - Flying Mercury

Since the 1990s, the Luxembourg artist Tina Gillen has worked the major themes of landscapes and dwellings to develop a visual language that examines the relationship between the individual and the world around them. In the course of her travels she has used the medium of photography to build up a bank of images that she complements with notes on different subjects and visuals collected from different iconographic sources (e.g. magazines, postcards, films, documentaries, old works). Tina Gillen extracts certain fragments from this inventory, simplifying them pictorially, subtracting or combining them with others to piece together an image that speaks to her time, interrogating its power and the complex relationship between reality and representation. Her compositions navigate between abstraction and figuration, between the constructed world and the natural environment, between interior and exterior, between the pictorial act and the rigour of the stroke, between the treatment of the canvas and crafting the volume of the subject. The ambivalent generated by her works is all the more reinforced by the subtle interplay of scales and perspectives, the repetition of forms, treatment of colours, formats and materials. Tina Gillen plunges her subjects into worlds of tension, inviting visitors into largely motionless atmospheres that are conducive to observation and interrogation.

In collaboration with the curator, Tina Gillen was invited to design an exhibition that relates to her work and to take charge the scenographic presentation of this project, with due regard for the architectural constraints of the spaces dedicated to it. The presentation imagined for this collaboration is in line with her continued research into the representation of landscape in the Anthropocene era.