Lilies

Spanning more than a decade of the artist’s practice, Lillies, David Gilbert’s first monograph, reimagines the artist’s studio as a paradigmatic space for multiple personhoods and alternative energies. Gathering 114 staged photographs, each composition depicts scenes of interiority, scaled-up dioramas of the artist’s psychic landscape embodying what it might mean to be an artist. And indeed, leafing through Lillies, one has the vague sense of peeping into something private: while there are no actual bodies, everything speaks to the artist's presence, with his photographs appearing as vacant portraits shot before or after the subject sits. As a consequence, the work ultimately grants the same attention to disposable materials as to actual human presence. And Gilbert’s constant focus on economical, ephemeral materials pushes us to reconsider what should be taken seriously and what should be discarded. From stickers to napkins and butcher paper, from painted cardboard to ripped rags and towels, from tulle to chiffon, ribbons, branches, sticks, and cans, the artist transforms banality into a constant wonder bearing unexpected and glorious details. And if all portraits are ghosts, in Gilbert’s case, with actual people absent from the frame, the studio set-up becomes itself the subject, finally merging photography, drawing, painting, and sculpture. All in all, Lillies pushes us, as viewers, to look for beauty – another kind of beauty; a deeper kind of beauty – where no sign of it had been detected, where we have been told not to expect it.

The book is completed by an essay by writer and curator Sarah Lehrer-Graiwer, which contextualizes and expands Gilbert’s practice, making Lillies a celebration of the temporary, the provisional, the impermanent, and the transitory.