Jaime Gili Venezuelan, b. 1972

Jaime Gili has been living and working in the United Kingdom since 1996. In 1998, Gili obtained his MA from the Royal College of Art in London, and, in 2001, completed a PhD in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona, Spain.

Gili belongs to a generation of Venezuelan artists who necessarily continue to examine the place of their practice within their inheritance of one of the most interesting Modernist movements in Latin America. In the 1950s, architects like Carlos Raúl Villanueva encouraged Venezuelan artists to redefine public space by integrating modern architecture and visual arts. The following generations of artists grew in the midst of this coalescence. In the words of Adrian Locke, Chief Curator of the Royal Academy of Arts in London, “Like Alejandro Otero (1921-1990), Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923-2019) and César Paternosto (b.1931) before him, Gili responds to the space in which he places his work. The surrounding architecture, whether internal and external, is a fundamental consideration.”

Gili has developed a unique style that represents a highly distinctive point of convergence between a specific inherited European modernism interlaced with Venezuela’s past historical modernism, and the current affairs. Aware that abstract painting cannot place current reality as such on to the canvas - for instance, the reality of protests and the disintegration of democracy - Gili takes on these issues through their tempo and the painting’s own slow process of becoming. Thus, gradually— and looking within its own limitations, Gili’s abstract paintings attempt to bridge the voids of time and space, the final message being one of a positive future.