Jaime Gili
1972, Caracas, Venezuela
Gili studied in Caracas, Barcelona and London, receiving his MA in Painting from the Royal College of Art and later completing a PhD in Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. During these formative years, he also spent time in Berlin and Paris, experiences that helped shape the international and cross-cultural dimension of his practice. Alongside his exhibitions, he has given talks and workshops at institutions including Tate, FRAC Marseille, the Royal College of Art, the Ruskin School of Art, UCL Bartlett and the Architectural Association.
Over more than two decades, Gili has exhibited widely across Europe, the United States, the Caribbean and Latin America. His work has appeared in both public and private spaces in cities including London, New York, Miami, Caracas, Barcelona, Paris and Mexico City. While deeply rooted in painting, his practice has consistently expanded beyond the canvas. Working with and through architecture, he has developed murals, installations and public projects that bring abstraction into direct dialogue with buildings, streets and the social life of urban space. This expanded understanding of painting is central to his work, allowing it to move between intimate scale and large site-specific intervention.
In his exhibitions, Gili has often explored the exchanges, tensions and overlaps between Europe and Latin America, as well as broader questions of migration, modernity, landscape and contemporary urban life. His work revisits the ideals of modernist abstraction while testing their relevance against present realities, including displacement, political uncertainty and the layered experience of the city. For this reason, his paintings and installations hold together formal clarity and cultural complexity: they are visually immediate, but also rooted in a sustained and thoughtful engagement with history, place and movement.
His work is held in important private collections internationally and in public collections including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Saatchi Collection, London; MUSAC, León; the Royal College of Art Collection, London; the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art; and the UK National Art Collection. These holdings reflect the recognition his work has received across different contexts over many years, and underline its place within a wider story of contemporary painting that moves confidently between Latin America, Europe and the broader international field.
