bitforms gallery

b.1951, Santa Monica, CA
Lives and works in Seattle, WA

Gary Hill has worked with a broad range of media including sculpture, sound, video, installation and performance, producing a large body of single-channel videos, mixed-media installations, and performance work. His longtime work with intramedia continues to explore an array of issues ranging from the physicality of language, synesthesia and perceptual conundrums to ontological space and viewer interactivity. Although working from a language/conceptual base, he is considered one of the foundational artists of media art.

Solo exhibitions of his work have been presented at the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in 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; and most recently at the Center for Contemorary Art, Tel Aviv among others.

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.

Hill has also worked collaboratively with a number of artists and writers 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. 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. Recently he had his opera directorial debut at the Lyon Opera House interweaving Beethoven’s Fidelio with the science fiction novel Aniara.

Hill’s gallery and museum exhibitions, of surf, death, tropes & tableaux: The Psychedelic Gedankenexperiment, premiered at the Barbara Gladstone, New York; Gary Hill: glossodelic attractors, an extensive survey exhibition at Henry Art Gallery in Seattle; Cutting Corners Creates More Sides, recently exhibited at In Situ/Fabienne Leclerc in Paris; Dream Stop, James Harris Gallery in 2016. Hill has exhibited several works in the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in India in 2016.

Hill has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts; Rockefeller Foundation and Guggenheim Foundation. He has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors, most notably the Leone d’Oro Prize for Sculpture at the Venice Biennale; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Fellowship Award; Kurt-Schwitters-Preis Prixe; and honorary doctorate degrees from The Academy of Fine Arts Poznan, Poland and Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle.

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