On the occasion of FIAC 2021, Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce a presentation of new and existing works by artists from the gallery programme, including Angela Bulloch, Werner Büttner, Sarah Crowner, Alex Hubbard, Paulina Olowska, Claudio Parmiggiani, Jim Shaw, Erin Shirreff, Clare Woods and Toby Ziegler.
Highlights include Werner Büttner’s vibrant painting No Scene from My Studio (2020). Büttner, who is renowned for drawing out deeper layers of meaning from the day-to-day, confronts social norms with both irony and satire whilst citing familiar tropes from the history of painting. In the satirical painting No Scene from My Studio, he invokes the visual language of Henri Matisse’s iconic cut-outs.
Dexter Dalwood similarly constructs multi-narrative compositions in his painting. He is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at Museo Nacional de Arte in Mexico, which brings together a group of recent works based around observations from time spent in the country. In Think with the Heart(Mexico) (2017) Dalwood combines this experience with his idiosyncratic approach to history painting, weaving together visual quotations such as the abstract flowers in a didactic composition that emulates the artist’s mental state at the time of its conception.
In Clare Woods’ recent painting The Keeper (2021) she uses the venerated motif of the flower as a symbol to explore the fragility of human mortality, highlighting the delicate border that exists between sickness and health, cruelty and humanity, and ultimately life and death. These themes are compounded by the act of painting and documenting the bouquet, eternalising the arrangement before its inevitable expiration. Beautiful yet sobering, The Keeper is a compelling memento mori that spotlights an arrangement of luminous white flowers.
The fluid, painterly form of Woods’ still life is juxtaposed on the booth with the abstract, biomorphic composition Peninsula (2020) by Sarah Crowner, a monumental work that draws parallels between modern abstraction and curvilinear forms from the natural world. Crowner creates her stitched paintings using an industrial sewing machine, weaving together painted and raw panels of canvas, simultaneously revealing the painting’s composition and construction.
