Maureen Paley is pleased to present the fourth solo exhibition at the gallery by Liam Gillick.

The Night of Red and Gold is a fictional nightclub event described by French philosopher Gilles Châtelet in his complex and passionate book To Live and Think Like Pigs: The Incitement of Envy and Boredom in Market Economies (1998).

In the first chapter we are taken to Le Palace in Paris on a night in 1979 where a new constellation of social relationships is falling into place.

“...a festive equilibrium, the cordial boudoir of the ‘tertiary service society’ which would very quickly become the society of boredom, of the spirit of imitation, of cowardice, and above all of the petty game of reciprocal envy—’first one to wake envies the others.“
Gilles Châtelet*

For this exhibition a series of new abstract forms are presented alongside various films made by Gillick since 2008. The works are archetypes of the various structures that have appeared in his work over the last few years, precisely engineered abstractions that are all silver anodized and wall based. The titles of the works, from Festive Self Regulation, 2019 to Resentment Industry, 2019, pay a tribute to Châtelet’s insights and his prescience. The main focus of the films and the structural works is cultural production and workplace aesthetics under the conditions mocked and raged against in Châtelet’s book.

The titles of the works, from Festive Self Regulation, 2019 to Resentment Industry, 2019, pay a tribute to Châtelet’s insights and his prescience. The main focus of the films and the structural works is cultural production and workplace aesthetics under the conditions mocked and raged against in Châtelet’s book.