Introduction

In his large-scale wall graphic Kinetic Energy of Rigid Bodies for Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne, Liam Gillick brings together abstract thought and figurative representation, pain and rationality.

Over the past twenty years, Liam Gillick, known for both his minimalist works and his critical-reflexive "dematerialised" ways of working as a writer and critic, has built an extensive archive of medieval prints. In large-scale vinyl graphics, he supplements woodcuts – illustrations from medieval manuscripts – with commentaries on consumption and conditions of production: A friar toasts the arrival of the first car to be produced with computer-controlled robots. Saint Sebastian thinks about the Return on Capital Employed. And a chivalrous knight dreams of hard-edged abstraction (A Depicted Horse is not a Critique of a Horse..., 2018).

At Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Gillick displays the motif of the wound man, familiar from medical-surgical manuscripts and prints of the late Middle Ages. At the very spot where Peter Paul Rubens' Crucifixion of St. Peter depicts the most agonising moment of martyrdom, Gillick's wound man muses with a stoic expression on the basis of a formula from classical mechanics about the kinetic energy of rigid bodies. On his naked body, the portraited figure displays his gruesome injuries produced by numerous knives, spears and other tools and weapons, although his face is marked by a strange expression of indifference.

Kinetic Energy of Rigid Bodies is a play on the oppositions of modes of representation, expectations and patterns of thought in science, religion and art. Gillick's contribution is the third part of the “Replace Rubens” series, in which artists such as Gerhard Richter and Walid Raad are displaying their works on the southern east wall where Peter Paul Rubens' Crucifixion of St. Peter (1638–1640) normally hangs, which is currently restored. The series will be continued from June by Kara Walker and will conclude in autumn with a position by Cologne artist Jana Schröder.