Jaime Gili is an artist based in London since 1996. He studied in Prodiseño, Caracas, his degree and a later PhD at Universitat de Barcelona, and an MA at the Royal college of Art in London, city where he has since settled. His main tutors through the years include Eugenio Espinoza in Caracas, Joan Hernández Pijuan and Joaquim Chancho in Barcelona, Claude Viallat in Paris, and Peter Doig, John Dougill, Jo Stockham and Paul Huxley in London. Throughout his career, Jaime Gili has developed the universal abstract language of the mid-20th Century into contemporary painting. More specifically, his work has been contextualised as a revision of Latin American abstraction, especially the Venezuelan optical and kinetic work of artists such as Carlos Cruz-Diez and Alejandro Otero, with an input from popular art and London's energy. Critic Fisun Guner wrote in 2003 about his show at the Jerwood Space: "What do you get when you mix Pop Art, Minimalism, Vorticism, Futurism and graffiti art? The answer may well resemble the work of Jaime Gili." Venezuelan Curator Jesús Fuenmayor wrote in 2006 for the catalogue of Gili's show at Periférico Caracas that his paintings were "as if someone had thrown a bomb at a work by Carlos Cruz-Diez". Swiss curator Oliver Kielmayer, wrote in 2009 "Jaime Gili seems to combine the wilderness of the jungle with a formalist and reductionist artistic language; the result is a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, a crystalline pulsating organism that almost comes alive." He completed a PhD at the University of Barcelonain 2001 with a thesis on "Repetition and Serial art since the 1960s". Speed and Repetition in painting have been his main research subjects throughout his study years but they still show in his paintings. He has shown work internationally in many exhibitions including '6 Bienal do Mercosul' in Porto Alegre; 'Expander' at the Royal Academy of Arts in London; 'Las tres calaveras' at Periferico Caracas in Caracas; 'Jump Cuts' at CIFO in Miami; 'The Complex of Respect' at Kunsthalle Bern; "Bill at Pittier" at Kunsthalle Winterthur and 'Indica', a show recreating the 1960s Indica Gallery at Riflemaker in London. Apart from his exhibitions, which have recently happened mainly in Miami, Caracas and London, he has also been invited to make several permanent works integrated into architecture. In Venezuela he completed "Diamante de las Semillitas", a work inPetare, a very high density informal city with a colonial core in the East of Caracas. He was also chosen to create a site-specific design for 16 large industrial storage tanks, in what would become one of the world's largest public art projects. Entitled "Art All Around", the event and work was produced by Maine Center for Creativity. The site is located along the Fore River in South Portland, Maine.
