Tim Gilman was born in Connecticut in 1971. Although primarily considered as an artist in cultural circles, Tim Gilman has a prolific career and thus a diverse profile. With a PhD in Media and Communications, he combines art and marketing in a bid to redefine cultural enterprises and institutions through the contemporary dynamics of social engagement, transparency and sustainable growth.
As part of this initiative, he has undertaken multiple, sometimes surprising projects. He is the founding artistic director of Gulliver’s Gate, the miniature world museum in Times Square, which started out as a Kickstarter project. He has also worked as a copywriter and Creative Director at Bodden Partners, McCann Erickson and Wunderman. Gilman has launched creative ventures in various fields: he helped found Studio 360, an interdisciplinary public radio arts programme for WNYC, was the founding Creative Director of Wunderman, the largest marketing agency in Prague, and worked with a Czech funk group, Sexy Dancers, on their double Grammy-winning gold album released by Sony Music. He is currently Executive Director of the Resilience, Education, Training and Innovation (RETI) Center, a New York City non-profit organisation founded to focus on turning disaster into potential by building urban resilience.
Enriched by this multifaceted experience, he is now a visiting lecturer at Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation, New York, the Parsons School of Design, New York, the School of the Visual Arts, New York, and others. He has written for cultural columns and has published a book, The Academy of Forgetting, which promotes critical thought as an academic methodological tool.
Artistically, his conceptual work is the result of a symbiotic relationship with his wife Františka Gilman, begun in 1998. In this context, one personality is difficult to separate from the other. Their corpus is multidisciplinary, but certain core themes run through the plethora of media they use and approaches they favour. The erasure of architecture is one, several works seemingly questioning how built mass society could be made to disappear to reach greater spatial balance between presence and absence. The concept of hidden spaces, such as those behind a door, under a staircase or as memory, is also a key trope. Retention, copying and, again, deletion of information are a constant focus in contrasting mechanical and human potential. Through memory, they broach the subject of subjectivity, individuality and intimacy, often explored in their art through spatial means. The fragment and the whole are timeless motifs that find an architectonic and hyperrealist variation in their body of work.
