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8/2/2012

Filip Gilissen

Wilfried Lentz Gallery, Rotterdam

Wilfried Lentz is very proud to host Filip Gilissen (1980, lives and works in Brussel) with his new installation:

in the gallery as well as in the public entries to the VIP openings of the art fair Art Rotterdam;

Wilfried Lentz Gallery is proud to host for the first time the Belgian artist Filip Glissen (1980) with his new installation Knowing Me Knowing You. Gilissen’s show will be the first in a series of three sequential shows this season, including three artists, whose work is informed by the 24/7 attention economy, with its excessive exuberance, loudness, self-exposure and extreme imagery.

For his new installation Filip Gilissen will take the gallery as main subject and will transform it into an ironic vehicle during Art Rotterdam. Knowing Me Knowing You is a set of 10 golden flickering digits hanging from a 3 x 4 meter steel frame and appearing mysteriously in the public entries to the VIP-openings during the art fair. The advertised number, reminiscent of a prank call hotline, is in fact the private phone number of Wilfried Lentz, and is connected to a synthetic golden phone, ostentatiously displayed in the darkened gallery space. Gilissen hereby alludes to the solid golden phone that appears as a relationship gift in the Havana episode of The Godfather: Part II. Hence, in the gallery set up, the golden ‘non-dial’ phone equipped with a blank-off plate in place of a dial, can only receive messages from outside callers who respond to the teaser, or from relatives and close friends of the gallery owner who would naturally call him.

Alongside Knowing Me Knowing You, two other works are displayed in the gallery: We Have Met Before Haven’t We?, a small metal golden phone index containing all professional gallery contacts, presented tantalizingly half-open under the protection of gold leaf and glass vitrine, and I've Been Waiting For You, a delicate crystal and gold door handle, that might have provided the longed for means to get a ‘foot in the door’, if they weren’t so delicately fragile that they would likely shatter if touched.

Using the language of commerce, marketing and media representation, Gilissen gives a diabolic comment on the more cynical aspects of globalization and consumer driven politics. He explores through events, performances, and installations, the one-liners of the spectacle industry. As Frances Loeffler puts it in an earlier article about Gilissen’s work, it is in his work ‘The notion of being on the ‘up’ and pushing it far and hard enough until it starts to collapse and ring hollow’. For the occasion, Loeffler has written a text on the new installation which will be published on our website and at the different locations.

Gilissen’s work has been shown at M HKA (Antwerp), Witte De With (Rotterdam), Freestate (Ostend), Liverpool Biennial, The Woodmill (London), Torrence Art Museum (Los Angeles), Nuit Blanche (Paris) and MARTa (Herford).

The opening will take place on Thursday, February 9 from 6 pm – 7.30 pm at the gallery and the show is running through February 25.

Wilfried Lentz Gallery
Groot Handelsgebouw Stationsplein 4 - Rotterdam
Thursday - Saturdays from 1-6 pm and by appointment
Free admission

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