À bientôt, j’espère… presents an array of archetypal abstract works by Liam Gillick, alongside a revisiting of his work relating to the French film collective Groupe Medvedkine (1967–1974)

Since the 1990s, Gillick’s abstract work has drawn upon the visual language of renovation, recuperation and re-occupation. He absorbs the aesthetics of neo-liberalism, which restage the remnants and surfaces of modernism as in the production of false ceilings, cladding systems and walls dividers. For Gillick, car production and kitchen design remain the two shadows cast when the aesthetics of advanced technology mask the failure of the modernist project and have been at the centre of a number of key works and exhibitions, including the German Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2009.

Alongside this is a focus upon the rise contemporary artist as a compromised figure, emerging alongside the collapse in traditional mass production in the Global North and the displacement of production away from the sites of consumption. Gillick’s general approach does not attempt to resolve the contradictions between his search for contemporary forms of abstraction and his critical texts, films and exhibition structures that often expose its implicated ideological underpinnings.