'Gary Simmons: Shine' ~ Haunting New Works at The Simon Lee Gallery in London

Written by Alexander Horowitz Sunday, 26 February 2012 20:23

London.- The Simon Lee Gallery will be hosting its second solo exhibition of renowned American artist Gary Simmons' work from April 8 until June 2 2011. For Gary Simmons, the act of erasure has been a central theme in his work throughout his career. Referencing film, architecture, and white American popular culture, his new “erasure”drawings move away from the use of paint and canvas, and revert back to pastel and chalk on black or white paper, which is where his practice began. Inspired by Stanley Kubrick’s 1980 film 'The Shining', Simmons uses the iconic imagery of the overlook hotel for one of his new drawings, whose imposing architecture takes on a haunting personality of its own. The image also incorporates the structure of The Bryce Hospital in Alabama, an institution to house African Americans deemed “insane” in the early 20th century. This alludes to the root of the inspiration of this new body of work: haunted spaces; Structures containing traces of memories, people, and stories that are no longer there but continue to resonate in the collective consciousness of viewer. The combination of social history and cultural reference works here to create an image alive   with its ghostly past. By erasing only layers and fragments of these images, the artist demonstrates the impossibility of eradicating racial and cultural stereotypes from our collective identity.

The artist touches on a number of recognisable motifs from the film, like the tricycle in Big Wheel Spiral, and the infamous text “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy” in 'The Diamond and The Page'. He uses the images not only to convey the idea of haunted structures and spaces, but also to illicit personal memories and experiences. Here the notion of the haunted space moves away from architecture, and manifests itself in the mind of the viewer. Gary Simmons, lives and works in New York City. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York, and completed an MFA at the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia, California. Simmons’ work has been included in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Studio Museum of Harlem, New York, the Walker Art Centre, Minneapolis, the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, the Kunsthaus Zürich, the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago and the Institute of Contemporary Arts London.




Using icons and stereotypes of American popular culture, Gary Simmons creates works that address personal and collective experiences of race and class. He is best known for his “erasure drawings,” in which he draws in white chalk on slate-painted panels or walls, then smudges them with his hands, a technique that renders their imagery ghostly. Shortly after his graduate studies at CalArts, Simmons found a studio back home at a former vocational school in Manhattan, New York. His space was empty but for several old-fashioned, wooden, rolling classroom chalkboards which he began using as canvases in a series of early works about mis-education and conceptions of racial and class identity. Interested in the medium's ambiguous and impermanent nature, he worked with chalk on boards or on walls painted with chalkboard paint almost exclusively in the 1990s. In these works, he often borrowed imagery from antique cartoons which depicted black caricatures. In a wall drawing called Wall of Eyes, commissioned for the 1993 Whitney Biennial, the black surface of the board is peppered with bodiless cartoon eyes of different sizes. Gary Simmons is represented by the Simon Lee Gallery in London. Considering himself primarily a sculptor, Simmons early three-dimensional work incorporated powerfully suggestive symbols of oppression including Ku Klux Klan signs, hoods and nooses. One of his large-scale wall drawings was most recently shown at Metro Pictures Gallery in Midnight Matinee, an exhibition of paintings and drawings which, like the installation Split Personality, depict semi-erased black-on-black drawings of settings from 1970's horror films. Visit the artist's website at ... http://www.garysimmonsstudio.com/

The Simon Lee Gallery was founded by Simon Lee in 2002 in a former disused car showroom in Berkeley Street, Mayfair. The premise of the Simon Lee Gallery has been from the start to re-present the work of established artists of diverse generations from Europe and the USA to a UK audience from an informed perspective and with a fresh and critical eye. The gallery also promotes younger artists from Europe and the USA whose work defines a new relationship to the conceptual and regularly punctuates its programme with historical exhibitions and curated group shows which enable us to present a lively perspective on contemporary art practice and thought, and to continue a broader dialogue with artists outside of the gallery programme. Within the London context, the Simon Lee Gallery provides a radical platform from which to present artists and their ideas. Visit the gallery's website at ... http://www.simonleegallery.com

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