Karlos Gil (Toledo, 1984) studied at the School of Visuals Arts in New York and at the faculties of Fine Arts in Lisbon and Madrid where he earned his PhD in 2016. He was awarded an International Visual Art Grant from Fundación Botín (Spain) and the Caja Madrid/Casa Encendida Art Award. He participated in different artistic residency’s programmes, namely at Gasworks (UK) and Fondazione Antonio Ratti (Italy). His work has been presented in solo and group shows, namely at: II Moscow Biennale, MMOMA (Moscow); Le19CRAC (Montbeliard, France); Fundación Botín (Spain); Centre George Pompidou (Paris); Gasworks (London, UK); Idoru (Helsinki); CA2M (Madrid); MARCO (Vigo) or La Casa Encendida (Madrid).
Karlos Gil is interested in how objects and their meaning are transformed when placed in new environments, using abstraction, fragmentation and memory to create new narratives and readings, collapsing the temporal distance between past, present and future. His latest projects reflect on the relationship between technological development and the principles of the natural world, focusing on the borderline between the organic and the artificial, the natural and the industrial. Through a variety of media, he creates fragmentary scenarios inviting viewers to fill in a missing context by layering the artwork with encrypted backstories from the likes of industrial evolution, mythology, the occult, and biological research. Gil has been exploring diverse forms as living encrypted systems where art acts as a hypothesis against the unknown.