ROTTERDAM, the Netherlands—British artist
Liam Gillick, who lives and works in New York and London, has been selected to represent Germany at the 2009
Venice Biennale, reports
Artforum. The curator of the German pavilion is
Nicolaus Schafhausen, director of Rotterdam's
Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, which mounted a retrospective of Gillick's work earlier this year. Gillick deals with "the varied phenomena of social utopias" in his art through "hypothetical social models." Says Schafhausen: "Through his need to play with the complexity of the contemporary terrain, Gillick has provided models of thought that are not merely binary. He has operated in parallel to known models of work—critic, designer, and artist.” For the last Biennale, in 2007, Schafhausen selected Berlin-based German artist
Isa Genzken.