Filip Gilissen’s (° 1980) oeuvre consists of installations, sculptures and performances. His work is, often ironically, dealing with the tension between art and entertainment, exaltation and boredom, the sublime and the banal.
His work has been shown at M HKA (Antwerp), Witte De With (Rotterdam), Freestate (Ostend), Liverpool Biennial, The Woodmill (London), Torrence Art Museum (Los Angeles), Nuit Blanche (Paris) and MARTa (Herford).
Gillissen’s work stands in a well-known but under-researched tradition of art that sarcastically celebrates the uncelebratable: a tradition that may be said to have begun with the famous case of the in-house string quartet stoically, even cheerfully playing on while the Titanic was busy sinking to the bottom of the ocean, a tradition that has thrived especially well in the ultra-cynical ‘post-political’ era of globalization. (Dieter Roelstraete, 2011)
His work touches upon the current day con- fusion between religion and marketing and offers a new form of protest. (Zoė Gray, Witte De With)
