Tina Gillen: Faraway so Close, Luxembourg Pavilion

Tina Gillen represents Luxembourg at the 59th Venice Biennale with her solo exhibition, “Faraway So Close.” The show, for which the artist has produced a new series of large-scale works, features an expansive installation curated by Christophe Gallois in the Luxembourg Pavilion, located in the Sale d’Armi in Venice’s Arsenale. Gillen conceived of the show as a response to the Sale, a building dating back to the 15th century and historically used as a military storage location. There, Gillen revisits traditional painterly themes like landscape and architecture to explore the relationships we entertain in interior space with the world outside and around us, integrating her paintings with what she deems the “loaded history and inherent constraints” of the Sale. Her work often begins with photographic imagery which she alters, simplifies, translates and combines with other motifs into deliberately ambiguous compositions oscillating between abstraction and figuration, structure and improvisation, surface and space.berately ambiguous compositions oscillating between abstraction and figuration, structure and improvisation, surface and space.