Tina Gillen was born in Luxembourg City as the daughter of a European civil servant. She completed her primary and secondary education in the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. As part of her higher education, she attended the Salzburg Summer Academy in 1992 and the Trier Summer Academy in 1993. From 1993 to 1996, she studied painting at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Subsequently, she graduated from the Higher Institute for Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, where she studied from 1996 to 1999.
Since 2007, Gillen has been teaching painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. She lives with her partner, a Belgian artist. The couple had two children in 2009. Tina Gillen is related to two Luxembourg artists: Berthe Brincour and Foni Tissen. Her artist's studio is located in the outskirts of Brussels.
Gillen is a multidisciplinary visual artist (painting, drawing, installation, ephemeral works). While her art is conceptual, her style ranges from figuration and abstraction. Her artworks focus on nature (e. g. Mountains, 1998), landscape and the relationship between people and their surrounding world: their environments, their architecture and their space-time context (e. g. Missile Park, 2003). In 2021, she developed a research project called Form of Life with the Mudam curator Christophe Gallois.
Since the beginning of her studies, Gillen has presented her work in numerous national and international monographic exhibitions. Among others, her solo exhibitions took place at the Nosbaum Reding gallery in Luxembourg (since 2001), at the M – Museum Leuven (2010), at the Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean in Luxembourg (MUDAM) (2012) and at the Center for Fine Arts in Brussels (BOZAR) (2015). She has also participated in numerous group exhibitions, for example at Platform Garanti in Istanbul (2004), at the Museum of Contemporary Art Antwerp (MuHKA) (2007), at WIELS – Centre for Contemporary Art in Brussels (2009), at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Mu.ZEE) in Ostend (2010), at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin (2012) and MUDAM (2009, 2010, 2018). Furthermore, she represented Luxembourg at the 59th Venice Biennale in 2022.
Gillen’s works can be found in national and international collections, including the Musée national d’archéologie, d'histoire et d'art (MNAHA) and MUDAM in Luxembourg, the Musée d'Art Moderne de Collioure in France and the MuHKA in Belgium. Since 2001, she has been represented by the Nosbaum Reding gallery.
Tina Gillen participated successively in artist-in-residence programmes in Budapest (1995), Madagascar (Antananarivo, 1997), France (Collioure, 1997-1998), the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam (1999), in Jakarta (2002) and the International Studio and Curatorial Program – ISCP, New York (2007).
She has been awarded several prizes, including the Prix du Concours Européen (Luxembourg, 1990), the Prix Jeune Artiste BIL (Luxembourg, 2000), the Premio del Golfo (La Spezia, 2001) and the Prix jeune artiste Dexia-Banque Internationale (Luxembourg, 2001).
Since the beginning of her artistic career, Gillen's work has captivated many national and international critics and art historians. In 1997, the art critic Marie-Anne Lorgé noted that Gillen's Häusersequenz, the sequence of her so-called 'weekend houses', introduced a new typ of still life: The displayed houses represent reflections on the human being. In 1998, the art critic Lucien Kayser emphasised that Gillen’s work can be considered a reflection on the practice and status of painting itself (Matamoros et al.). In 2013, the gallery owner Jacques Van Daele pointed out the highly rational nature of her work. According to him, Gillen composes and recomposes the image in her own way in order to provoke a kind of indifference in the viewer (Atelier Luxembourg 08:27-51). The artist thereby generates a space of freedom for thoughts. Gillen adds a certain unreality and timelessness to the way she treats the image. In doing so, she allows the viewer to rediscover poetry in reality (Atelier Luxembourg 09:09-10:06). In 2012, the art critic Nathalie Becker uses the term “enigmatic realism” to describe her work (70-71). As for the art critic Enrico Lunghi, he draws attention to the subtle balance between a certain rigour and a more intuitive approach in her work. In 2022, following the Venice Biennale, journalist Itzhak Goldberg describes the Luxembourg pavilion, Faraway So Close, as a theatrical set, which is both realistic and artificial (19). In Flying Mercury, an exhibition adapted from the biennal to the Konschthal Esch, it accentuated this ambiguous effect of "overcoming gravity" evoked by Ernst H. Gombrich (mentioned by the art historian Olivier Zyblok in 2008), according to the curator of the exhibition Charlotte Masse, "by suspending gravity in favour of visual experience", and by playing with "the spatial relationship between the body and the subject" (Masse 3).
Gillen draws her inspiration from her private experiences in order to extract the essential from them. In her work, she approaches the issues of her time. By using photography, the media or the Internet as a starting point, she is interested in the representation of the image itself in the medium of painting. Her figurative painting is very pure, almost abstract and captivates the viewer with its surreal, timeless and poetic atmosphere (e. g. Last Floor, 2002).
Works cited
Becker, Nathalie. "La Collection Luxembourgeoise du Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art. Tina Gillen. La réalité transposée." Ons Stad 101 (2012): 70–71. Print.
Gillen, Tina, Jacobs, Steven, Maes, Frank, and Oliver Zybok. Tina Gillen: Necessary Journey. Ed. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verl, 2008. Print.
Goldberg, Itzhak. "L’Italie et l’Ukraine, stars des ‘autres’ pavillons." Le Journal des Arts 588(2022):19. Print.
"Interview avec Tina Gillen: Paysage reconstruit." Désirs. Luxembourg Tendances Culture Spring (2012): 33–38. Print.
Lorgé, Marie-Anne. "Un point de rencontre de jeunes artistes. Au 'Tutesall' et au château de Bourglinster: Exposition 'Germination'." Luxemburger Wort 20.07.1997, p. unknown. Print.
Lunghi, Enrico. "Tina Gillen. Palyground." N. d. https://www.mudam.com/fr/expositions/playground. Web. Accessed 15.11.2021.
Matamoros, Joséphine, and Kayser, Lucien. Tina Gillen – Caravaning: Exposition au Musée d’Art Moderne de Collioure: Collioure du 24 octobre 1998 au 10 janvier 1999. Girona: Marques Tallers Grafics, 1998. Print. Exhibition catalogue.
Atelier Luxembourg. Directed by Yann Tonnar, performance by Tina Gillen et al., Samsa Film, 2014.
Wittocx, Eva Auteur, and Palais des Beaux-Arts. Tina Gillen: Echo. Bruxelles: Bozar, 2015. Print. Exhibition catalogue.
Zyblok, Oliver. "Floating in Space or, On the Idea of Dematerialised Images." Tina Gillen: Necessary Journey. Ed. Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verl, 2008. Print.
Malgorzata Nowara
2023-07-20
Please cite this article as follows:
Malgorzata Nowara."Tina Gillen."
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Last updated
2023-07-20.https://www.konschtlexikon.lu/entry/lkl000020/.Web.Accessed
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