Gary Hill (1951) is an American artist whose work has centered on video, installation art, sculpture and performance.Knight, Christopher. "Gary Hill’s Compelling, Confusing Video Show: MOCA’s Survey of This Important Body of Work Loses Something in Setup," Los Angeles Times, December 20, 1994. Retrieved October 9, 2025.Rush, Michael. "A Résumé of Surfing and Philosophy as Well as Art," The New York Times, September 15, 2002, p. 31–32. Retrieved October 9, 2025.Quasha, George and Charles Stein. An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings, Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009. Based on works extending over fifty years from the late 1960s onward, he is considered a foundational figure in the areas of single- and multi-channel video and new-media art.Kandel, Susan. "Focus: Gary Hill, Museum of Contemporary Art," Artforum, April 1995. Retrieved November 18, 2025.Smith, Roberta. "Making Magic Out of Videos, or Trying To," The New York Times, May 12, 1995. Retrieved October 9, 2025.Cooke, Lynne. "Foreword," in An Art of Limina: Gary Hill’s Works and Writings, George Quasha & Charles Stein, Barcelona: Ediciones Polígrafa, 2009. Retrieved October 9, 2025. Although his work has connections to conceptual art and minimalism, Hill is known for an independent approach that is inspired more by philosophical and literary texts than by central concerns of art and film such as representation, narrative and description.Pagel, David. "Sophisticated Video Installations From Gary Hill," Los Angeles Times, December 23, 1993. Retrieved October 9, 2025.Boehm, Gottfried. "Gary Hill – The Profundity of Images," in Gary Hill: Selected Works and catalogue raisonné, Holger Broeker (ed.), Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2002.Morgan, Robert C. "Gary Hill/Barbara Gladstone Gallery," The Brooklyn Rail, March 2007. Retrieved October 9, 2025. He has used an array of nascent technologies—computer software, projection, virtual reality, CGI—to examine consciousness and its relationship to the body, perception, time, and visual and verbal language.Darke, Chris. "Gary Hill, Museum of Modern Art, Oxford," Frieze, January/February 1994, p. 56.Vogel, Vogel, Sabine. "Gary Hill, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum," Artforum, November 1993, p. 120–21. Retrieved October 9, 2025.Yood, James. "Gary Hill/Donald Young Gallery," Artforum, Summer 2006, p. 358–59. Retrieved October 9, 2025.Morgan, Robert C. (ed). Gary Hill, Baltimore, MD: PAJ Books/The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Los Angeles Times critic David Pagel commented, "Hill creatively uses high-tech instruments to elicit personal experiences of archetypal simplicity. With his work, the invisible operations of thinking take tangible shape. Perception and cognition circle around one another, engaging their subjects."
Hill's work belongs to the public collections of the Centre Pompidou,Centre Pompidou. Gary Hill, Artists. Retrieved November 18, 2025. Los Angeles County Museum of Art,Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Gary Hill, Collections. Retrieved November 18, 2025. Museum of Modern Art,Museum of Modern Art. Gary Hill, Artists. Retrieved November 18, 2025. Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. Gary Hill, Collection. Retrieved November 18, 2025. Tate Gallery,Tate. Gary Hill, Artists. Retrieved November 18, 2025. and Whitney Museum,Whitney Museum. Gary Hill, Artists. Retrieved November 18, 2025. among others. He has exhibited at those and other international museums and been featured multiple times in events such as Documenta, the Venice Biennale and Whitney Biennial.Park, Hyun Jin (et al). Momentombs: Gary Hill, Suwon, Korea: Suwon Art Museum, 2019.Archer, Michael. "Documenta IX," Art Monthly, July 1992, p. 7–11.Brusatin, Manilo and Jean Clair. Identity and Alterity: Figures of the Body 1895/1995: La Biennale di Venezia, 46, Venice: La Biennale di Venezia, 1995.Jones, Karen. "Whitney Biennial," Tema Celeste, Spring 1993, p. 85. He has been recognized with awards including the MacArthur Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, Rockefeller Fellowship and Rome Prize.MacArthur Foundation. Gary R. Hill, Fellows. Retrieved November 18, 2025.John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. Gary Hill, Fellows. Retrieved November 18, 2025.Richard, Paul. "Gary Hill, Plugged in to the Electronic Avant-Garde," Washington Post, February 18, 1994. Retrieved October 9, 2025.The New York Times. "Academy Announces Winners of Rome Prize'" May 8, 2000. Retrieved November 18, 2025. Hill lives and works in Seattle, Washington and Mallorca, Spain.Abel, Kirsten. "The Makers: Gary Hill’s Mind-Bending Media Art," Seattle Magazine, August 27, 2015. Retrieved November 18, 2025.
Early life and career Hill was born in Santa Monica, California in 1951 and grew up in Redondo Beach, where he was an avid surfer and skateboarder.Furlong, Lucinda. "A Manner of Speaking: An Interview with Gary Hill," Afterimage, Vol. 10, Issue 8, 1983. Retrieved November 18, 2025. He began making welded sculpture at the age of 16, inspired by the artist Robert Anthony Park, before moving to Woodstock, New York in 1969. There, he studied at the Art Students League and independently with the painter Bruce Dorfman, and later became involved with Woodstock Community Video, a grass-roots television organization.Graves, Jen. "Gary Hill," The Stranger, September 14, 2011. Retrieved October 9, 2025.Broeker, Holger. "Gary Hill: Catalogue Raisonné," in Gary Hill: Selected Works and catalogue raisonné, Holger Broeker (ed.), Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2002.
In the 1970s, Hill integrated experiments with electronic sound, video, synthesizers and performance into his welded and mixed-media constructions.Frazier, David. "A Quick History of Video Art," Taipei Times, May 11, 2003, p. 19. Retrieved October 9, 2025.van Tuyl, Gijs. "Preface," in Gary Hill: Selected Works and catalogue raisonné, Holger Broeker (ed.), Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2002. Emerging amid the conceptual and performative context of that era, he worked on parallel tracks, producing single-channel videotapes that involved electronic image processing, distortion and language, as well as sculptural installations that used video and the body as elements.Iles, Chrissie. "The Metaphysician of Media," in Gary Hill: Selected Works and catalogue raisonné, Holger Broeker (ed.), Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2002.Liesbrock, Heinz. "Who Are You: Gary Hill's Transformation of Video Art ," in Gary Hill: Selected Works and catalogue raisonné, Holger Broeker (ed.), Wolfsburg: Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, 2002. For the installation Hole in the Wall (1974) he filmed himself cutting a television monitor-sized hole layer by layer through a wall at the Woodstock Artists Association. He then placed a monitor in the new orifice that played a loop of his recorded action, enacting video's occupation of exhibition spaces previously devoted to painting and sculpture.Iles, Chrissie. Into the Light. The Projected Image in American Art 1964 – 1977, New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 2001.
In the mid- and latter-1970s, Hill ran the Artists' TV Lab in Woodstock and was an artist-in-residence and instructor at the Experimental Television Center and a visiting professor in media studies at State University at Buffalo. In 1985, after participating in the US/Japan Fellowship Exchange program, he accepted an offer to establish the media-arts program at Cornish School of the Arts in Seattle.
Main themes Hill is considered a seminal artist in video and new media art. His work is known for its exploratory use of emergent technologies and for its post-structuralist focus on the nature of perception, language and consciousness. Many of his works employ visual and verbal syntax in ways that call attention to the unseen processes involved in human cognition.Sarazzin, Stephen. "A Voice From the Underground," Momentombs: Gary Hill, Suwon, Korea: Suwon Art Museum, 2019. Art historian Lynne Cooke wrote: "A pioneer in his embrace of the then novel medium of video, Hill distinguished himself through a radical approach that both literally and conceptually deconstructed it."
Hill's unconventional approach is seen as being grounded in literary and philosophical influences more than in art historical ones. Lageira, Jacinto. "Words in Bottle of Words," in Gary Hill: Mind Eye Blink(s), Paris: In Situ/Fabienne Leclerc, 2022. Whereas artwork typically draws influence from the art canon, Hill's work is informed by writers concerned with consciousness and communication, such as Maurice Blanchot, Gregory Bateson, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, and Marshall McLuhan. Critics note a resulting iconoclastic quality in his work, which privileges signification over representation, counteracts the illusion and smooth functioning of image sequences, and rejects cinematic and documentary conventions. Artforum critic Susan Kandel observed, "Hill's work is seductive in part because it is nothing like most video art. … [he] strips away the hardware, imperils the idioms with an idiosyncratic form of discourse, and interrupts the flow with strange moments of epiphany."
A key aspect of Hill's art is its intent and propensity to stimulate conscious reflection, particularly regarding the subconscious linguistic, visual and social processes involved in daily life. Through means including ambiguity, juxtaposition, distortion and fragmentation, the work operates on a meta level to illuminate such processes and encourage viewers to examine them. Many of the works are self-reflexive or designed to elicit self-consciousness in the audience.Decter, Joshua. "Gary Hill: Galerie des Archives," Artforum, November 1996. Retrieved November 18, 2025. According to critics, Hill's techniques create a liminal conceptual space whereby philosophical questions are posed but not answered, an approach which invites active participation—a hallmark of his art.
Embodiment is a recurring theme in Hill's work, which enacts the exteriorization of internal processes and explores ways in which physical form may limit and shape experience. He sometimes situates technology as an analogue to human embodiment or, conversely, makes novel use of technology to display bodies in ways that challenge prevailing convention.Grundberg, Andy. "Gary Hill, Museum of Modern Art," The New York Times, December 21, 1990. Retrieved October 9, 2025. For example, certain works mirror processes of the brain and body through the movement of signals between machines and screens, while others evoke the body using viscera-like arrangements of unhoused video tubes and cables.
Language is also central to Hill's oeuvre—specifically, how it functions, disrupts and fails in human thought and interaction.Hanhardt, John C. "Between Language and the Moving Image: The Art of Gary Hill," in Gary Hill, Robert C. Morgan (ed.), Baltimore, MD: PAJ Books/The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. Similar to his treatment of embodiment, Hill probes language as a mediator of experience and makes unexpected use of syntax to illuminate the role of linguistic structures in thought and interaction. As he does with images, the artist often rejects the logic of a received grammar of meaning, opting for "a language of evocation" to convey the richness of reality, rather than one of description or explanation.Pagel, David. "'Facts and Figures' That Add Up to a Picture of Ambiguity," Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1995. Retrieved October 9, 2025.
Individual works Single-channel video