Liam Gillick's practice covers multidisciplinary fields and manifests itself in a vast artistic, musical, essayistic and curatorial output, through which he reflects on the ways in which aesthetic systems coexist (and sometimes collide) with the political, economic and social agendas that form part of the structures of the contemporary world. Interested in the postulates of modernism, and questioning the extent to which these are (or are not) currently degraded and emptied of meaning, the artist appropriates their plastic and conceptual vocabulary to expose the problem of the existential conditions of the globalised individual in the transition from the 20th century to the current century.
Liam Gillick's work is particularly linked to the proposals of minimalism and conceptual art, which inspire the multicoloured and clean structures made of industrial materials (such as Plexiglas or aluminium), including the work Twentypartstwenty, from 2006/7. However, the interpretation of these works is not limited to the purely “conceptual” or the approach to abstraction as a minimalist principle: on the one hand, because each work contains idiosyncratic narratives, emphasised by more or less enigmatic titles that encourage speculation on the part of the viewer (in this case, the title seems to refer simply to the structural characteristics of the piece, which is made up of twenty coloured vertical elements); on the other hand, due to the conscious recourse to repetition, standardisation and regulated distancing, conceived as mechanisms for the interaction of the object with the space in which it is exhibited and with the viewer, and which give complexity and dramatic tension to something that is only apparently simple, stable, elegant and controlled. 

Joana Baião