On the occasion of April Bey’s first exhibition in the UK, Simon Lee is proud to host a talk between the artist and Gemma Rolls-Bentley on Saturday 3^rd September in the London gallery.

The event will begin at 10.30am with exhibition viewing time, the talk will begin at 11am and will be followed by a Q&A session before concluding at 12pm.

Tickets are free, but confirmation of attendance is required, please contact: events@simonleegallery.com

Congratulations to the amazing Sonia Boyce who has won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation for the British Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. 

The exhibition On Fire, curated by Bruno Corà, brings together some of the most iconic works either made with fire, or that include the presence of flames. Naturally fleeting, with no form, weight or density, fire has always fascinated artists, both for its potential effects on other materials and as an active presence in works of art.

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey. Work by Clottey will feature in the gallery’s upcoming Art Basel 2022 presentation. The artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery will be presented in Spring 2023 in London. Simchowitz Gallery continues to represent Clottey in the United States.

Sonia Boyce OBE RA will represent Great Britain at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2022. The exhibition will feature a major solo exhibition of new work from the artist.

For season 2022 in The Twist, Kistefos will present the first major survey in Scandanavia of artist Paulina Olowska (b. 1976, Gdansk, Poland), whose practice includes painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. The exhibition will comprise both earlier and recent works, including key works from Christen Sveaas Art Collection and Christen Sveaas Art Foundation, transitioning from a more traditional display in the closed gallery through to a dynamic installation-based presentation in the Panorama gallery.

This survey exhibition of collage work spans 30 years and features Marnie Weber’s resplendent, uncanny worlds that conflate the imagined and the sentimental. Tenaciously realized, her mixed-media collages are carefully staged and colorized dreamscapes inhabited by a wondrous roster of anthropomorphs and archetypes. Unreal Paradise takes us on a journey through absurd landscapes with the allure of desire, magic, and loss.

Dexter Dalwood’s practice presents an ongoing investigation into the role of images and painting in the construction of history. Reconstructing recent events of political and social relevance in juxtaposition with art historical, musical and literary sources, the artist explores the enduring relevance of painting as a means of communicating history and our interpretations of the subject. His cut-and-paste collage technique reminds us that if alternate realities can coexist within one image, then so too can they within both our everyday experiences and comprehension of past happenings. Dalwood constructs his paintings akin to how we construct memory, drawing together distinct concepts to provoke wider associations, encouraging his viewers to consider how actions, events and figurative images are understood. He invites us to reflect upon how we subjectively and collectively sample, frame, edit, crop and consume images in order to make sense of the world.

Benefiting the museum’s mission to support the art of our time, MOCA has created a series of collectible boxes featuring their world-renowned collection. The inaugural release features The Spirit Bear by Marnie Weber.

Artists Sonia Boyce OBE RA and Simone Leigh in conversation with Courtney J. Martin, Paul Mellon Director, Yale Center for British Art. Boyce and Leigh will represent the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively, at the fifty-ninth Venice Biennale, opening in April 2022.

In partnership with Barking and Dagenham’s Domestic Abuse Commission, Sonia Boyce’s Radio Ballad’s project invites individuals, community organisations and social care services into a discursive research process that creates a space for people’s lived experiences to be shared, listened to and made visible through collaborative artistic production.

Join us for a talk with artist Donna Huddleston and Katy Hessel, Art Historian, Curator and Founder of The Great Women Artists, on Wednestay 9 February at 6:30pm in our London gallery.

Paulina Olowska is acclaimed for her paintings, photographs, films and performances that often feature iconic women and engage with historical and cultural memories. This special conversation between the artist and Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick explores Olowska’s work alongside her selections from the Christen Sveaas Art Collection.

Paulina Olowska reveals the true nature of a gallery as a travel bureau, where works of art are portals into a myriad destinations imagined by artists.

Her installation of works from the Christen Sveaas Art Foundation is inspired by Orbis, the largest and longest running travel agency in Poland. Founded in 1920, its offices, staff and famously alluring posters offered prospective travellers a dream of escape. Olowska thinks of painting as ‘a beautiful metaphor for travel itself, a longing for a place.’

This exhibition will explore work by artists from the Caribbean who made their home in Britain, alongside other British artists who have also made work addressing Caribbean themes and heritage. It celebrates how people from the Caribbean have forged new communities and identities in post-war Britain – and in doing so have transformed British culture and society.

The Hamburger Kunsthalle is honouring Werner Büttner (*1954) with a solo exhibition on the occasion of his retirement, after more than thirty years of teaching painting at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, and is showing around 100 of his oil paintings and collages from the early 1980s to the immediate present. As a painterly analyst and with a crisp sense of humour, Büttner comments on human activity and existence in his art, without regard for taboos. His paintings along with their titles present the contradictions inherent in attempts at reaching social consensus; they hint at the political incorrectness of the 1980s and disarm any fighter for an ideal world. The Last Lecture Show presents Büttner’s eloquent flood of images in pointed exhibition sections.

Post-Capital brings together works of sculpture, painting, photography, video and performance that address the nature of production, consumption and wealth. The exhibition takes as its starting point the inherent paradox within a capitalist system that is both dependent upon and threatened by technological progress.

Time Without End presents video works, multimedia installations, and site-specific pieces that are dedicated to the textures of time, history, and narrative, asking how time-based media generates memories. The exhibition features Valerie Snobeck’s video Go Soft, 2014. 

In a new series inspired by Mexico, Dalwood unites observations from his time spent in the country (whilst on a residency at Casa Wabi, Oaxaca, in late 2017) with his personal brand of ‘contemporary history painting’, which weaves together visual quotations to express a space or a place that is more an abstracted mental image than a representation of the real. 

Michael Müller is devoting himself to one topic for the first time. “Mensch, der / Körper, der die, das” illuminates various facets of physicality and our feeling for the body - a highly virulent question in times of genetic reproductions and operative optimization of the body, which leads to interesting insights.

You’ll Find Your Peace with Me is a screening programme of videos from the Mudam collection, organised to accompany Enfin seules. Photographs from the Archive of Modern Conflict. An atmosphere of anxiety towards the natural world is cultivated by João Penalva in Kitsune (2000), which depicts fog clearing across a desolate landscape as two men trade disquieting stories about a shapeshifting fox spirit. 

In No Thing is Waiting there are no clocks. The visitor is encouraged to consider time outside of minutes and hours, and instead in relation to object(ive) experiences. The past year has fundamentally changed how we perceive time, becoming ever more quantified by 40-minute video calls, 5pm press conferences and beer garden booking systems. But this is just our perspective. Bringing together 17 multi-generational artists, No Thing is Waiting proposes our experience of time could be reconstructed through engaging with artworks that embody processes and continuation. The exhibition aims to disrupt our habitual perception of time by rewinding bodily rhythms through the use of colour, shifting daylight, changeable sonic tempos and multiple viewpoints. Here, time is stretched, contracted, and relative.

The exhibition Cangiante – Based on the Caixa Geral de Depósitos Collection, curated by Antonia Gaeta, brings these elements together and promotes a dialogue between the various works, techniques and materials of the artists represented in the Collection. The exhibition’s curatorship is an open one and permeable to the work of the guest artists Ana Manso and Dayana Lucas about something that already exists, but which now has the possibility of being different.