Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce Crossroads, a solo exhibition of new and recent work by Ghanaian artist, Serge Attukwei Clottey. For his inaugural exhibition with the gallery, the artist explores the relationship between his Ghanaian identity and Western culture, traversing the expanse of his multidisciplinary practice.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present To See Beyond Seeing, a solo exhibition of new paintings on canvas, paper and copper exploring unconscious fate in everyday reality by Nigerian born, London based artist Helena Foster.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present France-Lise McGurn's installation Aloud, The exposé, on view from 20 December 2022 - 14 January 2023.
Composed of a wooden frame and painted Perspex panels, McGurn’s characteristically fluid figures are all the more dynamic when presented across transparent screens, appearing to reach, lean and leap through the air. The outline of faces, torsos and limbs traverse painterly swathes of colour to form a narrativedefying ensemble of figures, crested by glowing neons.
Simon Lee Gallery and Varvara Roza Galleries are pleased to announce Jasmines blowing in the wind, a solo exhibition of paintings by Winston Branch. For his inaugural exhibition with the gallery and his first in the UK in 25 years, Branch will present a selection of historic works that delve into the possibilities of painting through abstraction.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present Just for the Record, Sonia Boyce OBE RA’s inaugural solo exhibition at the gallery. On view from 12 October – 16 December 2022, the exhibition coincides with Boyce’s Cork Street Banners commission which will be unveiled on 13 October 2022.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present PINTURAS GRISES, an exhibition of new works by Valentina Liernur. For the artist’s second exhibition with the gallery and debut solo exhibition in London, Liernur continues her exploration of quotidian city life through a series of seemingly monochromatic figurative paintings that depict everyday life through the surreptitious gaze.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce a solo exhibition of new and recent works by Michelangelo Pistoletto. For his fifth exhibition at the gallery, the artist presents a series of mirror paintings that reflect on themes of captivity, isolation and restriction at a fractured moment in contemporary history.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Modern Family, an exhibition of new works by William Mackinnon. For his first solo show in Hong Kong, Mackinnon presents eight paintings depicting trees. With this body of work, the artist continues a long-standing investigation into the motif, which takes on new meaning as the tree becomes the sole protagonist. Painted during a period of profound change in his personal life, these works are imbued with a new sense of growth and direction.
Simon Lee Gallery and Zuecca Projects are pleased to present a joint exhibition of works by Jim Shaw and Marnie Weber at Squero Castello in Venice, Italy. The works of Shaw and Weber span a wide range of artistic media and visual imagery, from the detritus of American culture to the surreal worlds of fantasy and folklore, both drawing from the subconscious as their source of artistic creativity. In parallel with the theme of The Milk of Dreams, the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia, both Shaw and Weber transform the personal, the commonplace and the uncanny into dream-like narratives and magical worlds that unfold the mysteries of our subconscious and imagination.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce German painter Georg Karl Pfahler’s inaugural presentation in London, a comprehensive survey of defining works from throughout the artist’s career. The exhibition showcases a collection of paintings and works on paper that celebrate the legacy of Germany’s first Hard Edge painter.
Pfahler developed his mature style in 1958 with his first series, Formativ. However, it was not until 1962 that Pfahler began incorporating his signature block-like forms alongside crisply defined areas of colour that embody his first Hard Edge paintings. These features epitomise his subsequent series, including Metro, West-Ost-Transit, Espan and Fra Firenze, all represented in this exhibition.
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Toby Ziegler, in which the artist continues his analysis of the compression of time into painting and the speed of making and unmaking an image.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Garth Weiser, the artist’s fourth presentation with the gallery.
Garth Weiser’s practice has been dominated predominately by abstract imagery but in recent works Weiser fuses abstraction and figuration. Weiser layers gestural impastoed paint, ordered geometry, and disembodied figurative forms. Using a variety of devices such as tape, exacto blades and shipping nets he disrupts, interrupts and cuts into the various layers partially revealing the printed imagery underneath. The resulting painting surfaces feel scarred and sculptural. He creates a surface that is at once controlled and free with images flickering in and out of recognition. By employing this method of addition and subtraction, Weiser’s works underline his fascination with the evolution of painting.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Grayscale, a group exhibition featuring selected works in shades of grey. Since the early Renaissance period, the ‘grisaille’ technique has been used by artists to imitate the look of sculpture in paintings executed entirely in shades of grey. Grayscale investigates the ways in which grey continues to capture the fascination of a new generation of artists. Uniting diverse visual languages that encompass a range of artistic expressions, these works renew and challenge how we perceive the colour grey, articulating the complexity of a colour that is both contemplative and poetic.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce Donna Huddleston: In Person. For her inaugural exhibition with the gallery, the artist presents new works on paper that explore themes of doubles, stand ins and performance.
On the occasion of its second exhibition at Blanc Art Space’s pop-up project space in Beijing, Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present Mel Bochner’s Blah, Blah, Blah (2011), a monumental eight-part canvas that represents the apex of his eponymous body of work. The painting acts as an altarpiece in the darkened exhibition space, as though a chapel of Blah Blah Blah, inspiring such spiritual associations as the 15th-century polyptych Ghent Altarpiece painted by brothers Hubert and Jan van Eyck, or the more contemporary Rothko Chapel in Houston. Blah, Blah, Blah is infused with a sense of ritual and drama inherent to many forms of worship and that invokes connotations of artistic pilgrimage, bringing to mind seminal destinations including Bochner’s contemporary Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah’s Salt Lake. As an icon of the artist’s most renowned series, Blah, Blah, Blah invites the viewer to experience a total immersion into Bochner’s central doctrine: the intersection of linguistic and visual representation.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Rainbow Unicorn Rhombus, an exhibition of new and recent works by Angela Bulloch, preceding a major exhibition at the Musée d’Arts de Nantes, France in 2022.
Bulloch’s multidisciplinary practice finds associations between the visual language of 20th century modernist art movements and the digital realm, encompassing a range of technologies from computer games to science-fiction narratives. Exploring the relationship between real and virtual space, the artist’s fascination with dimensionality is reflected in a new series of stack sculptures made from corian and stainless steel, a wall painting and a digital video that mirrors the exhibition, transporting the visitor out of the physical gallery space and into its virtual counterpart.
Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong is proud to present German painter Georg Karl Pfahler’s first solo exhibition in Asia, coming ahead of a comprehensive survey at the gallery’s London location in Spring 2022. The exhibition explores work made between 1965 and 1975, in a concise presentation that traces the evolution of Pfahler’s works from his Tex and Metro series, begun in the early 1960s, to his later Ost-West Transit and Espan series that define Pfahler’s practice during the 1970s.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Farewell Transmission, an exhibition of new and recent paintings by Australian artist William Mackinnon as part of Blanc Art Space’s inaugural pop-up project in Beijing’s Shunyi District. This will be the artist’s first solo show in China.
Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to present You Have a New Memory, Rachel Howard’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery in London. The show brings together a new body of work that continues Howard’s pursuit of the possibilities of painting through experimentation.
Simon Lee Gallery presents a series of new paintings by British artist Dexter Dalwood on the occasion of his second exhibition at the Hong Kong space. In these recent works, Dalwood looks nearly four decades into the future, to the year 2059; something that the title of each painting in the exhibition makes reference to.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by the Argentinian artist Valentina Liernur. The exhibition is the artist’s debut show with the gallery and marks the first time her work has been presented in Asia.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani in London.
For the past 40 years Parmiggiani has concentrated his practice on themes of memory, absence and silence, in his search for an image, object or assemblage that transcends time and individual experience to evoke a universal, existen- tial truth.
Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong is pleased to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Paulina Olowska. Olowska’s oeuvre has long been informed by her examination of the restrictive stereotypes that underpin representations of womanhood in the history of art. Seeking to depict femininity in all its guises, Olowska’s visual language asserts and redefines the capacity of the female gaze in painting, encoding each work with symbols and narrative cues that embolden her subject’s physical and psychological presence.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present No Scene from My Studio, an exhibition of new and recent works by artist Werner Büttner. This is the artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery, coming ahead of a major retrospective spanning his career since the early 80s at the Hamburger Kunsthalle, Germany later this year.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by New York-based conceptual artist Mika Tajima. For her debut solo exhibition in the UK, Tajima presents new paintings, textile works, and sculptures that focus on psychic and bodily energy under the regulation of technocapitalism.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of Dexter Dalwood’s collage studies. These works have only been shown once previously in the UK as part of Dalwood’s 2010 exhibition at Tate St. Ives, which later travelled to FRAC Champagne – Ardenne and CAC Malaga.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann’s third solo exhibition at its Hong Kong space. Encompassing works from across Feldmann’s nearly five-decades long career, this survey show includes sculpture, photography, installation, collage, the appropriated image and found object.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Pop-Up, a group exhibition presented in partnership with Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, travelling especially from Antwerp to London.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Alex Hubbard. This will be his second solo exhibition with the gallery and his inaugural presentation in Hong Kong.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Sky, Rocks & Digits, a joint exhibition of works by Berlin-based artists Angela Bulloch and Josephine Pryde. Concerned with the interplay between bodies and technology, both artists explore the historic and ongoing significance of technological mediation and what that produces, enables or prohibits.
Simon Lee Gallery, New York is pleased to present Pedestrian Profanities, a group exhibition of interdisciplinary artists, designers and polymaths curated by Eric N. Mack, which explores the relationship between fine art, design and fashion, and the ways in which they are activated by a participating body.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present a selection of recent works on paper by Eric N. Mack to coincide with his curated group exhibition Pedestrian Profanities, currently on view at Simon Lee Gallery, New York.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw, his first at the London gallery since 2016. As the United States prepares for its upcoming Presidential election, Shaw is more analytical and daring than ever before in his satirical depictions and social commentary.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Strive for the light, an exhibition of new paintings by Australian artist William Mackinnon, his first solo show in the UK. In this latest body of work, Mackinnon reflects on memories of trees in and around his family farm in western Victoria, and on formative experiences living in remote indigenous communities in the Kimberley region. Painted during a period of prolonged isolation as a result of lockdown, the symbol of the tree is imbued with a deep sense of longing for home, family, regrowth and regeneration.
Simon Lee Gallery, New York is proud to present an exhibition of new ceramics and tapestries by Swiss artist, Mai-Thu Perret. This will be Perret’s fifth show with Simon Lee Gallery and her first at the New York space.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of recent works by Los Angeles-based artist Marnie Weber, her first solo show in Hong Kong. This exhibition coincides with the Busan Biennial, in which Weber is presenting a major installation that includes her new film, Song of the Sea Witch.
Simon Lee Gallery presents a special project in collaboration with Vasily Klyukin. Throughout his practice, which spans architecture, design, literature and sculpture, Klyukin has sought to eternalise the intangible. The Russian-born, Monaco-based artist is concerned with humanity and the natural world: patterns and systems found within nature, as well as human emotion and memory.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present The sudden longing to collapse 30 years of distance, Toby Ziegler’s sixth solo exhibition with the gallery, in which the artist explores the complex relationships between experience and memory, image and data, through the twin lens of figuration and abstraction.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present WORDS, a group exhibition that explores the function of language and the role of text in art making. Whether dealing in political statements, ribald asides, poetry and literature or illegible scrawls and scribbles, the works in this exhibition comment on the ways in which ideas are exchanged and communication effected.
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong is pleased to announce a presentation of new works by Gary Simmons, comprising drawings and a painting, which continue the artist’s ongoing exploration into the politics of race and identity through his signature ‘erasure drawings’.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present Puzzled Daydreams, a solo exhibition by Hong Kong-based artist Chris Huen Sin Kan comprising, new paintings and works on paper. Huen’s largescale oil paintings are derived from observation of his own life, portraying quotidian experiences through a fresh set of aesthetic strategies that bring the domestic and surreal into compelling partnership.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an online exhibition of works by German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann.
Since the 1960s, Düsseldorf-based Feldmann has amassed a prolific collection of photography, painting, postcards, knick-knacks and everyday ephemera. With the majority of his work untitled and undated, he gives away as little empirical information as possible to his audience, instead encouraging an unbiased viewing experience, unbound by context.
Eric N. Mack refers to himself as a painter, yet his works rarely observe the medium’s traditional canvas-to-stretcher format. Rather, his tactile creations, made from a dynamic combination of used textiles, worn clothes, moving blankets and torn rags, alongside pieces of paper, photographs and pull-outs from books and magazines, extend and transform the notion of painting. His use of colour, form and material as elements in a compositional lexicon, as well as the stained or dyed fabrics which are his principal medium, declare the origin of his practice in the investigation of painting in an expanded field, while the way his compositions occupy and transform space are evidence of their sculptural nature. They are at once paintings and sculptures, fully engaging with both disciplines.
Simon Lee Gallery, New York, is pleased to announce a group exhibition featuring new works by Mira Dancy, France-Lise McGurn, and Clare Woods. Connected through an interest in figurative representation, the exhibition brings together three artists who present the body in unconventional ways, each exploring contemporary issues surrounding gender, sexuality, society and politics, as well as addressing the long and problematic history of the male gaze. The submissive female subject typically depicted reclining, seated or kneeling, is one of the most recognizable motifs in art history. As seen in this exhibition, Dancy, McGurn, and Woods respond to this convention through disparate methods presenting the figure as alternatively dominant, vulnerable, playful, or even androgynous, restoring to their subjects a sense of agency and recontextualizing the trope for our contemporary moment.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce WET SLIT, a solo exhibition of new works by Bolivian-American artist Donna Huanca. This is Huanca’s debut exhibition with the gallery and her first solo show in London since SCAR CYMBALS, her 2016 commission at the Zabludowicz Collection. Incorporating painting, sculpture, sound and scent, Huanca’s site-specific installation immerses viewers in a total environment which synthesises her unique aesthetic with a politics of the body as it relates to space and temporality.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce Percussia a solo exhibition of new work by Glasgow-based artist France-Lise McGurn. This is the artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery and the first in London since Sleepless, her 2019 solo exhibition at Tate Britain. The artist will present new paintings, works on paper and site-specific wall paintings across both gallery floors. The exhibition coincides with a major site-specific commission by the artist on view at Tramway in Glasgow. Subsequently, McGurn will also be participating in Glasgow International in April.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce a solo exhibition by the London-based Portuguese artist, João Penalva. For his first solo exhibition in New York since 2002, Penalva presents two new series of work based on photographs taken at the São Carlos National Theater, in Lisbon, Portugal, that explore the physical mechanics of theatrical fictions and illusions.
Following a career in dance, João Penalva began his second career as an artist in 1976, working initially as a painter. Today, Penalva is known for making large-scale installations in various media, as well as more intimate works that combine painting, photography, video and found objects, image, text and sound; addressing narrative modes and the relationships between each medium. His storytelling is often fractured, presenting juxtaposed narrative elements, allowing the viewer a latitude of freedom in their interpretation.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present News from Nowhere, an exhibition of new works by Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret. This will be her second solo exhibition at the Hong Kong gallery.
The exhibition’s title derives from British polymath and socialist activist, William Morris’ 1890 novel of the same name, in which he imagines a utopian future liberated from systems of capitalism. Blending utopian socialism with science fiction, the narrative follows William Guest who, after returning home from a meeting of the Socialist League, wakes the next morning to find himself catapulted into the twenty-first century and into a world beyond all recognition. Following revolutionary upheaval, England, now called ‘Nowhere’, has become a humane socialist society in which all people live in equality. Yet just as quickly as he finds himself in this paradise, Guest is transplanted back to the nineteenth century where he resolves to make his dream of the future a reality of the Victorian social order. Perret’s practice directly references Morris, whose vision of a utopian future reflects the fictionalised women-only commune that has been central to her work for the past two decades. The Crystal Frontier explores the lives of an autonomous community who have abandoned Western neoliberal society for the remote desert of South Western Mexico, envisaged by the artist as a refuge from the ills of capitalism and patriarchal convention. Like Morris’ News from Nowhere, Perret’s project engages with the promise of an ideological agenda that promotes egalitarian human relationships.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings by Merlin Carpenter. The show considers the hand-painted object’s capacity to engage with and complicate the language and history of the readymade.
Merlin Carpenter’s work grapples with the potential relationship between painting and the readymade; and the possibility of collapsing the ideas that distinguish these practices. Since the 1990s the readymade object has been an integral line of inquiry in Carpenter’s work; and in more recent years he has presented a number of readymade works that hang flat on the wall like a painting. Carpenter’s new hyperrealistic paintings push the boundaries of painting into the discourse of the readymade in another way: the five works are so highly finished that they appear like a product, delivered from elsewhere. In this stark new presentation, Carpenter encourages the audience to both critique the authenticity of the paintings and simultaneously accept the role of the artist's hand.
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, is proud to present a survey of photographs by renowned Japanese photographer Daido Moriyama, spanning the breadth of his five-decades long career. From examples of his idiosyncratic black-and-white street photography to a more recent collection of digital colour images, the exhibition captures Moriyama’s discordant impressions of city life and chaotic visions of everyday existence, which have proved so influential to successive generations of photographers.
Simon Lee Gallery, New York, is pleased to present Since Last We Met, an intergenerational group exhibition organized by Debra Singer in collaboration with Simon Lee Gallery.
Since Last We Met centers around an imagined set of metaphorical conversations among artists who experiment with notions of materiality. Blurring boundaries between painting and sculpture as well as between craft and fine art forms, artists from three generations are put in discussion with one another, as they transform found and commonplace objects into new works, alternatively reflecting uncanny sensibilities or an embrace of cultural or gendered embodied identities. With works dating from the 1970s to the present, the show reflects eclectic material sensibilities generated from production methods that are alternatively virtuosic and hand-crafted, on the one hand, or industrial and ad hoc, on the other. Among the artists on view are Anna Betbeze, Elaine Cameron-Weir, Verena Dengler, ektor garcia, Mike Kelley, Eric N. Mack, Robert Morris, Robert Rauschenberg, and Michael E. Smith.
Paulina Olowska’s exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery, London, constitutes the latest chapter in the artist’s continuous and fertile research into image-making, exploring the ways in which she interprets painting as a vehicle for her idiosyncratic visions and as a facilitator for the exchange of feelings and sensations with the viewer. Spanning the gallery’s three floors, Destroyed Woman puts forward a visual and emotional landscape through which to contemplate the self and the other, provoking our consideration of themes such as womanhood, ageing, the power of tradition and the spectator’s gaze. With this exhibition Olowska invites us to thoroughly re-contemplate representations of women, particularly within an art historical context, and to redefine the purpose of their portraiture; how, she asks, can we reformulate tradition to encompass what has been destroyed and what needs to be invented?
In Olowska’s latest series of paintings female figures are captured posing, working or acting in diverse backgrounds. For the most part they are represented alone, engrossed in their own thoughts or activities. They watch us, watching them, all of us absorbed in both past and future.
Coinciding with Frieze London, Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce a presentation of ‘Schüttbilder’, or ‘Pour Paintings’ by influential German artist, Sigmar Polke (1941-2010).
Amongst the most significant figures in the artistic landscape of post-war Germany, Polke was renowned for an experimental approach to painting that pushed the boundaries of both medium and material. The pursuit of chance operation and an irreverent wit are hallmarks of a career that staunchly resisted easy categorisation or alignment with any specific movement or genre. While his multidisciplinary practice encompassed innovations across photography, film, print, drawing, sculpture and performance, it was as a painter that he most thoroughly tested aesthetic convention. Polke’s interrogation of the formal and material traditions of paint led to the invention of alchemical processes and a use of unorthodox substances, which created a constant dialogue between order and disorder, chaos and control, all the while addressing the cultural and historical impact of an abstract practice in two dimensions.
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, is pleased to present a group exhibition featuring the works of Holly Coulis, Nevine Mahmoud and Christina Ramberg. Working in painting, sculpture and drawing respectively, all three artists transform traditional, art-historical subject matter often through an exuberant sense of individualism, opening interpretations of the human body and domestic objects to new possibilities.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce Doublethink, the first solo exhibition at the London gallery of British artist Clare Woods, who presents new paintings across both gallery floors.
Over the course of a career spanning more than twenty-five years Woods has developed a unique painterly language that is concerned with the moulding of an image in two dimensions. Her early practice as a sculptor continues to inform her exploration of physical form via the materiality of paint. Although at first concerned with landscape, a preoccupation with the human body and its connection to entropic themes of mortality, degeneration and disease has surfaced in the artist’s work. For Woods, the corporeality of her subject matter and the physical element of the paint are inextricably tangled up in one another. In these new works, Woods employs an often-bilious palette that subverts the viewer’s expectations of her virtuoso application of paint on aluminium. Defamiliarising the everyday, Woods probes the boundaries of figuration to challenge her audience’s experiences of fear, anxiety and the fundamentally destructive impulses of humankind.
Simon Lee Gallery, New York, is pleased to present a two-person exhibition featuring the work of Los Angeles-based artists Marnie Weber and Justin John Greene. This occasion marks the first time Weber has exhibited at the gallery’s New York location, as well as the second time for Greene, whose work was previously included in the 2017 group exhibition An Uncanny Likeness.
The exhibition opens a dialogue between two artists of differing backgrounds and generational affiliations, who similarly interrogate latent aspects of the cultural imagination. Both deal in densely populated tableaus depicting archetypal figures engaged in surreal narratives, synthesizezing divergent aesthetic tropes into coherent, unified compositions. Weber draws her point of departure from Depression-era farm country, whereas the setting for Greene, is hyperactive, present-day Los Angeles. Both artists bring the gothic undercurrent resting just beneath the surface of American life to the fore.
Simon Lee Gallery, London, is pleased to present En Plein Air, bringing together works by artists who seek to reinterpret the artistic tradition of painting outdoors for a contemporary audience. The plein air approach has been prevalent since the mid-19th century, although it gained traction in the 1860s as a practice essential to the development of the Impressionist movement. While artists had long painted from observation to create preparatory sketches or studies, during this period the plein air method led to a naturalistic style that threw out the academic rulebook in the pursuit of formal and compositional spontaneity. The artists included in En Plein Air are united by a desire to refresh the audience’s interpretation of outdoor painting, whether via landscapes or portraits, photography or painting, figuration or abstraction, and in this way, the exhibition explores scenes of the outdoors in relation to contemporary studio practice.
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong is pleased to present Out for Summer, a concise exploration of the practice of painting, presented through the lens of nostalgia, a celebration of the quotidian, and of the fleeting, by artists, Qian Jiahua, Guo Hongwei, and Lin Yi-Hsuan.
United by their personal, buoyant treatment of colour, line and form, each artist distinctly delivers paintings that are as introspective in their intimacy, as they are inviting in their warm approachability. Guo’s paintings are imbued with the endless sense of adventure and fantasy inherent to summer. Meanwhile, Lin distorts form and line through abstraction, manipulating his medium and taking reference from the South American and Taiwanese cultures that he identifies with to create highly personal and meditative paintings. Qian explores line, form and structure, sensitive to the impact of space. Her canvases are positioned at the unlikely, but harmonious intersection of deafening structure and restrained silence, gentle movement and bold order, seeking to challenge the conforms of a traditional canvas.
Simon Lee Gallery, New York, is pleased to present Studio Photography: 1887-2019, a wide-ranging survey exhibition featuring work by a diverse group of artists whose studio-based practices span the past 130 years. During this time period, the establishment of photography as an artistic medium, the ensuing major advancements in image capture technology and the resulting evolution of photography from an intensive, specialized art form to an inescapeable aspect of everyday life, has led to innovative developments in the field of fine art photography.
A broad, cross-generational overview, Studio Photography: 1887–2019 develops multiple long-ranging conversations among artists engaged in specific areas of inquiry. Finding common ground, John Edmonds, Robert Mapplethorpe, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, and Lionel Wendt all employ the historical genre of portrait photography in order to grapple with issues surrounding representation and identity; however, their strategies are varied and, occasionally, in conflict. Elsewhere Barbara Kasten, Willa Nasatir, and Erin Shirreff present complex, abstracted images through their use of sculpture. Similar to Constantin Brancusi, these artists transcend straightforward documentation of their sculptural work, suggesting a rich interplay between two- and three-dimensional forms.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present the European premiere of New York-based artist Marilyn Minter’s video work My Cuntry ’Tis of Thee (2018). This is the artist’s debut exhibition with the gallery and her first solo presentation in the UK in thirty years.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings on velvet by American artist Mel Bochner. This is the artist’s third solo exhibition with the gallery.
For nearly 60 years Bochner’s intellectual and material analysis of painting, photography and sculpture has yielded ground-breaking works that explore the intersection of linguistic and visual representation. As a leading figure within the conceptual and post-minimal art movements of the 1960s, he experimented in complicating the relationship between image and language.
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Garth Weiser, the artist’s third with the gallery.
Weiser’s densely layered paintings celebrate and interrogate the possibilities of the genre. His unorthodox and exploratory approach to surface, dimensionality and perception has resulted in a body of work that is as engrossing and revealing, as it is imaginative.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by British Canadian artist Angela Bulloch at the New York space, for the very first time. The show is comprised of new Night Sky works, prints, sculptures and wall paintings.
Simon Lee Gallery, London is pleased to present a series of new paintings by Indonesian artist Arin Dwihartanto Sunaryo. In these works, he pours volcanic ash and resin on plexiglass to create abstract compositions profoundly connected with his homeland. This will be the artist’s first solo show in the UK since 2010.
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, is proud to present a series of new paintings by Austrian artist, Heimo Zobernig, his first ever solo exhibition in Hong Kong.
For forty years Zobernig has conducted a thorough re-interpretation of the languages of formalism via an expansive body of work that moves seamlessly between an array of disciplines, from architectural intervention and installation, to performance, film, video, sculpture and painting.
Simon Lee Gallery, New York, is pleased to announce Invisible Force, an exhibition of new and historical work by Japanese conceptual artist, Keiji Uematsu, his first ever solo presentation in the United States.
Uematsu’s multidisciplinary practice strives to illuminate the invisible relationships between objects and the spaces they inhabit. For more than five decades the artist has carried out the terms of a rigorous manifesto that spotlights the de-familiarization of space and draws his viewers’ attention to the interplay of such natural forces as gravity, tension and material attraction through media including photography, drawing and sculptural installation. Uematsu is often associated with the Japanese Mono-ha group of artists, who rejected traditional methods of representation in favor of an engagement with natural and industrial materials, focusing on the ways in which they interact in space in largely unaltered states. Yet his aesthetic is set apart by his pursuit of Western theory and philosophy, which contributed to his decision to move from Japan to Germany in 1975.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings by Dexter Dalwood, his second to be held in the London gallery.
‘In this modern world where everything plays out fast and it plays out in the open at incredible speeds and just when it seems like we are all in on it and interconnected….’
― NBC news anchor intro.
Dalwood’s paintings celebrate and interrogate the history of the medium. They demonstrate an awareness of the continued significance of painting as a means of communicating the ways in which we experience our everyday existence. He crafts narratives of memory that bring together the past, present and future in a single image, forging a bridge between our interpretation of what has already come to pass and that which has yet to happen.
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, is pleased to present the first solo show in Asia by New York artist Sarah Crowner. The exhibition will comprise a series of new stitched canvas paintings by the artist, as well as a collaboration with the Hong Kong-based scenic painter and theatre set designer, Pink Lam. Paintings For The Stage will be a continuation of the artist’s architectural and scenographic interventions, as seen most recently in her works at the 57th edition of The Carnegie International at the Carnegie Museum of Art, scenery and costume design for Jessica Lang’s Garden Blue for the American Ballet Theatre Company, and the commission she created for the Wright restaurant at the Guggenheim Museum of Art, New York.
Simon Lee Gallery, London is pleased to present Metal, a group exhibition of sculptures in metal produced between 1968 and 1990. The exhibition comprises works created by some of the most prominent and innovative artists of the twentieth century, pioneers of the Minimalist and Arte Povera movements. The exhibition links together artists working in industrial materials such as aluminium, iron, and steel, who challenge the viewer’s relationship to space through various methods of intervention, proposing unexpected ways of seeing and interacting.
Simon Lee Gallery, New York, is pleased to present Password Revolt, a solo exhibition of new works by British artist Clare Woods. This show marks Woods’s first solo exhibition in New York since 2002 and represents a continuation of the themes addressed in her first exhibition, Rehumanizing, at Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, in 2018.
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Asia by Los Angeles-based artist Channing Hansen. In Pattern Recognition Hansen presents a new series of his signature hand-knitted textile-based works, which bring together craft and computation to explore theories related to the intersection of art, science and technology.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new photography, together with some models in 3D, by Josephine Pryde, her second to be held in the London gallery.
As part of its Viewing Room programme, Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present a solo presentation of ceramic works by gallery artist Mai-Thu Perret. Known for her multi-disciplinary practice that engages installation, performance, sculpture, textile, and the written word, Perret derives inspiration from such avant-garde art movements of the twentieth-century as Dada, Constructivism and Bauhaus design, exploring the ways in which modernist form and artisanal genres, including craft, fashion and theatre, collide.
Simon Lee Gallery New York is pleased to present Fake As More, an exhibition organised by Front Desk Apparatus, New York. The exhibition features historic and contemporary works, each in varying states of repetition, replication, copy and self-copy.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Your Mother, an exhibition of new paintings by London-based artist Toby Ziegler. This is his second solo exhibition with the gallery in Hong Kong.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present a survey of paintings and works on paper by Yun Hyong-keun. The Korean artist’s second solo exhibition with the gallery examines the connection between his painting and drawing practices across the full breadth of a career profoundly connected with the history and culture of his native country. Yun is currently the subject of a retrospective at The National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (MMCA), Seoul, Korea, the first major solo exhibition of the artist at a national institution in Korea.
As part of its Viewing Room programme, Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present a concise solo exhibition by New York-based artist Ryan Mrozowski. His latest work – paintings in acrylic on linen, covered in natural and botanical motifs – explores optics, repetition and the depiction of nature, examining perception and the ways in which we experience pattern.
As part of its Viewing Room programme, Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Family Guy. Art dealer and collector Kenny Schachter’s latest foray into the murky waters of curatorial practice positions his own work and that of his wife, Ilona Rich, and children, Adrian, Kai, Gabriel and Sage Schachter, alongside the artists his family grew up with, including Vito Acconci, Sarah Lucas, Rachel Harrison, Rudolf Stingel, Paul Thek, Franz West and Christopher Wool. All of these artists have played an intrinsic role in the lives of Schachter and his family, providing daily inspiration and directing them towards novel artistic languages and new means of communication.
Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong is pleased to announce the first solo exhibition in Asia by Los Angeles-based artist Kathryn Andrews. Presenting a new series of wall-based sculptures and one floor-based work, Andrews probes the visual contradictions of Pop Art and Minimalism, marrying the historical languages of the two movements into playful combinations that are both optically and conceptually rich.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist, Gary Simmons. This is his fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Simon Lee Gallery New York is pleased to present The Tissue of Memory, a cross-generational group exhibition that considers the gesture and its history, as exemplified by the practices of Kelly Akashi, Robert Mangold, Agnes Martin, Win McCarthy, Monique Mouton, Josephine Pryde, Gary Simmons, Cy Twombly, and Heimo Zobernig.
As part of its Viewing Room programme, Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Welcome to Our Mess a solo exhibition by Los Angeles-based artist Justin John Greene, his first in the UK. This new suite of paintings offers a panorama of a sun-washed, tragicomic barbeque with scenes set against the background of an oddly utopic neighbourhood, in which themes of conflict and romance are paramount.
Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, is delighted to present a group exhibition of works by Jeff Elrod, Alex Hubbard and Yang Shu. Working across the painted medium, all three artists share a commitment to gesture, colour and graphic mark-making, albeit in very different ways. Yet a common approach to anti-hierarchical materials and techniques unites the three artists, each of whom continues to challenge the traditions of painting in bold and experimental ways, not least in their handling of the performative gesture and the ways in which it can be relayed in two dimensions.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Towards Infinity: 1965-1980, an exhibition of major works conceived by artists from across the international scope of the Conceptual art movement, with special focus on the period between 1965 and 1980. During the 1960s and 1970s a disillusionment with pervasive movements in art and the influence of radical European theoretical thought inspired a re-evaluation of long-held attitudes towards formal and material conventions. Taking its title from Giovanni Anselmo’s seminal work of the same name, Verso l’infinito (1969), the exhibition explores the dematerialisation of the art object and the dismantling of concepts that had bolstered the definition and context of traditional art-making well into the 20th century. Working across a wide range of media, including photography, film, video, performance and installation, the artists in the exhibition all demonstrated an anti-hierarchical approach to both subject and material that positioned the idea first and form second. All the works presented adhere to the fundamental premise put forward by Anselmo’s Verso l’infinito, challenging the constructs of time and space to create an art that is at once forward-looking, in flux and without limits.
As part of its Viewing Room programme, Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Wormhole a solo exhibition by New York-based artist Leelee Kimmel, her first in the UK. In her latest work, Kimmel presents a series of large-scale abstract paintings that are confrontational in both colour and dimension, exploring themes of creation and destruction. The immersive element of her work is further developed through sculptural pieces and a five-minute Virtual Reality work that invites total submergence into the deep space of Kimmel’s creative world.
The large-format paintings feature graphic shapes clustered in thick multilayered pools of bright acrylic paint, which weave across fields of solid white or black. The paintings are imbued with a restless energy and freedom that is intrinsically linked with how the artist creates her works. The resulting compositions deliberately move in and out of representation, sensuous and strict, gloss and matte, tangled and full. The complex patch-work of imagery, consisting of crosshatch and opposing vector-like lines and patterns as well as interrupting biomorphic forms, has an otherworldly quality. Forceful and nervous lines are reminiscent of artists such as Basquiat and Twombly, while the uncanny worlds and dreamlike atmospheres created by the artist emerge into a sort of mutant realism.
Simon Lee Gallery New York is proud to present a concise exhibition by American abstract painter Roy Newell (1914-2006), showcasing paintings spanning over half a century of the artist’s career, including works that come directly from the artist’s Estate and that have not previously been shown in New York. Characterized by their multi-layered surfaces, irregular geometrical patterns, obsessive reworking and luminous tonality, the works on display reveal an expressive power that aligns Newell with the Abstract Expressionist movement, of which he was an original member.
As part of its Viewing Room programme, Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Holly Coulis, her first in the UK. In her latest work, Coulis presents a series of vibrant paintings that traverse the traditional genre of still life painting, and delight in the geometry of the everyday.
The oil on linen works on view depict simple scenes of quotidian life - familiar objects and foodstuffs arranged precisely and playfully on tables and countertops. Reminiscent of early modernist and cubist still life painting, Coulis’s domestic scenes are flattened, and the objects and surfaces are broken down into distinct areas or planes of unvariegated colour that represent different viewpoints. In each painting, there is a play and invention in constructing the space, and often the challenge lies in deciphering the dynamic of the table, whose lines and edges bisect and mirror the shape of the canvas.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of paintings by Bernard Frize, the fourth to be held in the London gallery. This exhibition brings together paintings from Frize’s most recent series with works made in the decade from 1999 to 2008. As the Centre Pompidou prepares for its first major survey exhibition of the artist’s work, to be held in 2019, the juxtaposition of these works reveals both the consistency of Frize’s project, and his constant innovation.
Throughout his career, Frize has revisited and revised his own works from earlier series. The loops and switchbacks of the trajectory of his career seem to echo those interweaving marks which structure many of the paintings themselves. He has spoken of these structures as devices for the removal of compositional decisions. The paintings proceed in series; the series are determined by the rules which govern them. He continues until the variations, and the possibility to produce new results, are exhausted. Frize’s project is, simply stated, one of reducing painting to its most fundamental elements, of using structure and system to govern and regulate the compositional process and thus absolve the artist from the decision making process, so that there is nothing more to the work than its physical, even technological, method of production.
Simon Lee Gallery New York is pleased to present Towards Infinity: 1965-1980, an exhibition of major works conceived by artists from across the international scope of the Conceptual art movement, with special focus on the period between 1965 and 1980. During the 1960s and 1970s a disillusionment with pervasive movements in art and the influence of radical European theoretical thought inspired a re-evaluation of long-held attitudes towards formal and material conventions. Taking its title from Giovanni Anselmo’s seminal work of the same name, Verso l’infinito (1969), the exhibition explores the dematerialization of the art object and the dismantling of concepts that had bolstered the definition and context of traditional art-making well into the 20th century. Working across a wide range of media, including photography, film, video, performance and installation, the artists in the exhibition all demonstrated an anti-hierarchical approach to both subject and material that positioned the idea first and form second. All the works presented adhere to the fundamental premise put forward by Anselmo’s Verso l’infinito, challenging the constructs of time and space to create an art that is at once forward-looking, in flux and without limits.
As part of its Viewing Room programme, Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present The Alphabet of Creation (for now) an exhibition of new works by New York-based artist and art dealer Joel Mesler. For his first solo presentation in the UK, Mesler will exhibit new paintings from his ongoing body of work based on the alphabet, in which each painting is devoted to a single letter, drawing on memories from his childhood and his hometown of Los Angeles.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present Misa Hylton-Brim, Eric N. Mack’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery and his first in London. The exhibition features a new body of the artist’s signature large-scale assemblages, which oscillate between painting, sculpture, the readymade and performance, at the same time initiating a dialogue between fashion and art.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings by Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw. This will be the first exhibition of paintings by the influential American artist to be held in Asia.
Shaw moved to California from his hometown of Midland, Michigan in 1975 to attend Cal Arts, and along with fellow Michigan-native Mike Kelley, is one of a number of notable artists to emerge from the school in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Over the past thirty years, he has become one of the United States’ most influential and visionary artists, working in painting, sculpture, and drawing, and building connections between his own critical and psychological perspective and America’s broader political, social, and spiritual histories. His work is distinguished by rigorous formal and structural analyses of neglected forms from vernacular culture, informed by his large collections of objects representative of consumer desires, religious fervour, and a constantly evolving counterculture. For Shaw, these seemingly mundane artefacts reflect shifting social and political values and the way in which individual Americans are the product of a variety of conflicting forces.
As part of its Viewing Room programme, Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present work by American abstract painter Roy Newell (1914-2006), marking the first solo exhibition of the artist’s work in the UK. This concise presentation showcases seventeen paintings spanning over half a century of the artist’s career. Characterised by their multi-layered surfaces, irregular geometrical patterns, obsessive reworking and luminous tonality, the works on display reveal an expressive power that aligns Newell with the Abstract Expressionist movement, of which he was an original member.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present the first solo exhibition in America of new works by Hong Kong-based artist Chris Huen Sin Kan. With no prior sketching or planned outcome, Huen’s large-scale oil paintings are derived from observation of his own life, portraying quotidian experiences through a fresh set of aesthetic strategies. In constructing a constellation of moments that compose his daily life, Huen imbues domestic representational painting with both deft abstraction and the hallmarks of traditional ink painting.
Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to present works from celebrated Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto’s most recent series of mirror paintings, in which he directs his attention towards the subject of scaffali, or shelves. This will be the artist’s fourth solo exhibition with the gallery.
Pistoletto is widely recognised as one of the most influential contemporary artists of his generation and a central figure within the Arte Povera movement. From early in his five-decade career the mirrored surface has been an instrumental element of his practice. Initiated in 1962, Pistoletto’s signature mirror paintings use the reflective picture plane to draw both viewer and environment into the work, playing with traditional notions of the painted image as a fixed moment in time.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present, for the first time in Asia, an exhibition of new works by London-based artist Clare Woods. For over 15 years Woods’ painting practice has been an exploration of physical form through the materiality of paint. Originally trained as a sculptor, Woods established her reputation with large-scale landscape paintings rendered in enamel on aluminium. Based on photographic source images, her immersive paintings of diverse scale have more recently moved into figurative works rendered in rich hues of oil paint. With an acute understanding of sculptural language, Woods’ interpretations shift between figuration and abstraction imbuing this central tension with volume, weight and interior mystery.
On show as part of its ‘Viewing Room’ programme, Simon Lee Gallery presents a concise selection of drawings by Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw. The remarkable variation in scale and visual narrative on display highlights a crucially important part of the artist’s oeuvre, and the works on view trace defining elements in his ongoing artistic practice with humour, skill and insight. Whether as preparatory studies or as works in their own right, these monochromatic works on paper offer an intimate sense of the artist’s creative and conceptual process that mines the collective subconscious of American culture through a mix of the familiar and the absurd.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of late paintings by pioneer of twentieth-century abstraction, Hans Hartung (1904-1989). This inaugural presentation with the gallery celebrates the last, highly productive decade of the artist’s life, which saw him return to many of the themes that had occupied him throughout his career, while expanding his repertoire with an array of innovative painting practices. Hartung’s late painting, much of which was made from the confines of a wheelchair, is amongst the most vigorous of his lifetime, revealing a renewed sense of freedom, energy and ambition despite his advancing age and increasing frailty. Although the artist’s dramatic approach to the medium was remarkable throughout his career, it was not until the 1980s that many of his freest and most experimental works were produced. Distinguished by dramatic shifts in technique, tools, scale and gesture, Hartung’s output over the course of his last years is testament to his rich and constant exploration of the language of abstraction.
Simon Lee Gallery, in collaboration with the Archivio Luciano e Carla Fabro and Micheline Szwajcer, is proud to present a solo exhibition of historic works from the early 1960s by celebrated Italian artist Luciano Fabro (1936-2007), his first in London since his landmark show at the Tate Gallery in 1997. A leading figure in the landscape of post-war Italian art and proponent of the influential Arte Povera movement, Fabro is renowned for his radical practice that offered a re-evaluation of sculptural form via a rigorous approach to spatial context, material and meaning. Concerned with the environment of both work and viewer, the foundational theoretical works presented in this exhibition explore the framing of space with a spare and elegant simplicity designed to induct the viewer into a participatory experience, in which sensibility and seeing are symbiotic. Although later works by the artist employed sumptuous materials – silk, marble, bronze – Fabro’s first works encapsulate with economic means the experimental poetry that would come to define the conceptual innovation of his near five-decade long career.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present for the first time in Asia, an exhibition of new video works by Paris-based artist Isabelle Cornaro. The multi-disciplinary practice of Cornaro considers the various material and conceptual shifts that occur when an object is transformed into an image.
The advent of the home studio in the 1970’s democratized both music and art, with cities like New York becoming significant platforms for the convergence of both practices. Partially due to financial instability brought on by urban decay and political neglect, artists embraced a do-it-yourself mentality which inevitably led to interdisciplinary experimentation. Although this time period was marked by metropolitan downturn, the phenomenal successes of these new wave forms of art making led to their ironic commercialization. Through a diverse group of artists and media, New Pleasure showcases the intersection of music and art after punk rock and investigates how artists have taken direct influence from musicians, have participated within either genre, or have performed as musicians themselves.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of wrapped paintings by Merlin Carpenter. In 2009 Carpenter came up with the idea to make new interpretations of a group of paintings from the 1960s by the British artist John Hoyland (1934-2011). Carpenter was drawn to this particular body of work for its engagement with and furtherance of the ambitious large-scale US painting of the time.
Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong is pleased to present Trip of the Tongue, a group exhibition curated by Piper Marshall that examines how communication is filtered, trained, and disciplined. The title comes from a mistranslation of a common English phrase- “slip of the tongue”- meaning a specific kind of verbal blunder that is an excess of intended speech. Such slips can be telling, when they reveal our inner thoughts unintentionally, or they can also be random, absurd, or humorous. As social errors, they detour the conversation and push against the control we typically try to exert over our language.
Simon Lee Gallery New York is proud to present the first solo exhibition in America of Japanese artist Ryuji Tanaka. A recognized member of two avant-garde groups that are synonymous with post-war Japanese art: the Pan-real Art Association and Gutai Art Association, Tanaka’s legacy lies in his desire to evolve a unique artistic style that is at once experimental, and yet deeply rooted in the traditional Japanese-style painting - nihon-ga.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new and recent paintings by New York and Marfa-based artist Jeff Elrod, his third with the gallery to date. Recognised for his large-format abstract paintings concerned with the relationship between hand-painted and digitally created mark-making, for this exhibition Elrod has created a series of hybrid images that incorporate analogue techniques into his continued experiments in digital and print technology.
Simon Lee Gallery New York is delighted to present Metropolis, an exhibition that showcases how artists use the city as a source for materials, subjects, and ideas. The works present how artists can interpret the metropolis in multifarious forms, and illustrate the universality of the city.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present a concise survey exhibition of paintings by Japanese artist Ryuji Tanaka, his first posthumous solo presentation in the UK. A recognised member of two avant-garde groups that are synonymous with post-war Japanese art: the Pan-real Art Association and Gutai Art Association, Tanaka’s legacy lies in his desire to evolve a unique artistic style that is at once experimental, and yet deeply rooted in the traditional Japanese-style painting - nihon-ga.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present the second exhibition of new work by Bernard Frize to be held in our Hong Kong space. Since the late 1970s, Frize has explored and elaborated the processes that define painting, with inventive means of applying paint that allow him to develop a profound exploration of his method and of the materiality of the medium. Devising a process that allows the painting to emerge through its implementation, the works develop out of the logic of material procedures instead of a predetermined composition. More agent for the prescribed procedures than architect, Frize eradicates personal decision rather than premeditating the end result. Free of personal expression, his practice is based on technique and movement in which paint, tools and formulated methods for applying paint on canvas determine the motif or pattern.
Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong is pleased to present an exhibition of new work by three artists whose links of friendship and common interest contrast sharply with their widely divergent approaches to painting, strategies of image making and the relation of narrative content in their work to the field of abstraction and figuration.
Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to announce an exhibition of new paintings by Garth Weiser, his second exhibition with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in London.
Emergent images in Weiser’s abstract paintings flicker in and out of focus like analogue TV static. Ghosts of cartoon-like figures puncture the surfaces, shape-shifting as the eye is teased through dense layers of dots and drips, scumbles and scrapes, peaks and troughs.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong of American artist Mel Bochner. For some 50 years, Mel Bochner has explored the intersections of linguistic and visual representation. As a leading figure of conceptual and post-minimal art movements during the 1960s, Bochner experimented in complicating the interface between reading and seeing. Emerging at a time when painting was increasingly discussed as outmoded, Bochner became part of a generation of artists, including Eva Hesse, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson, who were looking at ways of breaking with abstract expressionism and traditional compositional devices. Investigating philosophical and mathematical theories, Bochner examined the conventions, codes, and grammars we routinely use to grasp the external world, playing with cognitive strategies of counting, measuring, and ordering, using rationalising systems such as numbers, measurements and definitions to explore the irrational nature of being.
Simon Lee Gallery New York is pleased to present Black Feast, an exhibition of works that emerge from experiences of anxiety, protest and trauma, both direct and mediated. Through a wide range of voices, the exhibition will explore parallels between disparate communities and their relationships to personal and collective trauma. The works within Black Feast showcase how an individual’s subjectivity is shaped not only in times of palpable crisis, but also amidst the unseeing violence of passive complacency. Either arising in explicit reaction or illustrative of psychological unrest, an artist’s work can carry a collective sense of emergency.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce the fourth exhibition by renowned Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani.
Over the course of his career, Parmiggiani has maintained a radical stance and singular vision, utilising recurring motifs such as dust, emptiness, fire, glass, bells and shadows to interrogate the dual nature of time. His overarching investigation is his search for an image, object or assemblage that transcends time and individual experience to evoke a universally existential and perceptual truth. It is a search that is at the heart of his practice, an excavation of history and mythology that is rendered still, silent and impervious to time.
Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to announce Screen Memory, a group exhibition that reflects upon how multi-generational artists have engaged with the complex notion of collective memory. Working across painting, photography, installation and video, the artists each have very distinct approaches yet collectively reveal the paradoxical ways in which individual and shared memories are retrieved and intersect.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present An Uncanny Likeness, a group exhibition organized by Franklin Melendez and Romain Dauriac in the newly re-launched New York space.
The show revisits the legacy of portrait painting bringing together a diverse group of artists whose practice revolves around the re-drawing of the figure. Eschewing the ‘faithful reproduction’ as convention, these artists pursue emotive distortion and stylistic idiosyncrasies that foreground painting’s relationship to the body. The resulting tableaux are thick with symbolic meaning, conjuring altered states and arcane visions that are as indebted to the virtuosic flourishes of Mannerist painters as the elastic possibilities of present day visualizing techniques.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present for the first time in Asia, an exhibition of new painting and video works by Paris-based American artist Will Benedict. Benedict’s layered use of media and striking compositions disrupt the usual distinctions between frame and picture, painting and reproduction and explore conditions of the image, culture and methods of interpretation. Deconstructing conventions of representation, Benedict’s work incorporates disparate elements, addressing contemporary issues but is also imbued with a sense of incongruity and ambivalence.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present our second exhibition in Hong Kong of influential German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann.
Characterised by its engagement with art history and vernacular imagery, Feldmann’s conceptual work has developed over more than four decades. A compulsive collector and appropriator of found images and everyday ephemera, Feldmann’s oeuvre incorporates photography, sculpture, installation, drawing and painting. With surprising humour and subtle intervention, he systematically reconstructs existing images and objects to reflect on representation and the construction of ideologies.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new sculptures by acclaimed artist Angela Bulloch. One way conversation… is a continuation of Bulloch’s latest body of work presented last year in Considering Dynamics and The Forms of Chaos at the Sharjah Art Museum, UAE and L'ALMANACH 16 at the Le Consortium Dijon, France. Formed in steel and MDF, the stacked columns of polyhedra have a stylized geometry and manufactured surface sheen that alludes to minimalism and technology. Often apparent in Bulloch’s installations where technology mediates interaction with the work, is her interest in cybernetics, fundamental themes of biological, social and technological systems, and the integration of the human subject with technology.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce a solo exhibition of new work by Toby Ziegler, his fourth exhibition with the gallery.
Matisse’s Large Reclining Nude (The Pink Nude), 1936 provides the starting point for Ziegler’s new series of paintings and a new two channel video work (all 2016). Ziegler was drawn to the painting’s embodiment of a shift from figuration to abstraction. The development of Matisse’s painting between May and October 1935 was documented in a series of 22 black and white slides that illustrate the painting’s evolution from illusionistic to two dimensional space. Through this surviving documentation we can see how Matisse edited, cropped, flattened and stretched the body in its context to greater effect in the painting, retaining the human figure, whilst tightening and streamlining the motif like a piece of typography or a logo.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present the first solo exhibition in Hong Kong of artist Marco Brambilla. Re-contextualizing century old histories with an array of pop cultural sources, the painterly dimensions of Brambilla's films combine cinematic techniques and technologies to challenge the standards of fine art and Hollywood. With precise technical production and seamless editing, Brambilla’s multi-layered tableaux of interconnecting images and looped video blend into expansive landscapes.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present a concise survey exhibition of paintings by Korean artist Yun Hyong-keun, one of the leading figures of Dansaekhwa, in his first posthumous solo presentation in the UK.
The series of large Burnt Umber & Ultramarine Blue oil on linen works included in the exhibition date from between 1990 – 1993 and reflect a transformative moment in the artist’s career, when the abstract forms in the work grew larger, darker and fewer in number. The exhibition also includes a smaller scale Burnt Umber & Ultramarine Blue oil painting from the same period executed on Hanji paper – a Korean paper made from the fibrous skin of the mulberry.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present Connect 4, an exhibition exploring the role that social connections and artistic interconnections play in the practice of a group of artists living and working in Hong Kong. Evoking the qualities of the networked city and the broader experiential possibilities of art, the close-knit artistic community of Hong Kong inevitably cultivates a rich sensibility of participation in and referencing between the practices of each artist. This exhibition presents an inter-generational group of artists whose practices explores vernacular materials, forms and contemporaneous emotional and social conditions.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce a solo exhibition of work by Dutch conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader, one of the most influential artists of his generation. Forty years after the end of his brief career, his concise body of some thirty-five works created between 1969 and 1975 continues to inspire artists, writers, curators and critical thinkers.
Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong is proud to present Fractured a selected group exhibition exploring one of modernism’s most characteristic formal strategies, the fracturing of the picture plane. Just as the Renaissance development of perspective yielded the possibility of the representation of three dimensional space in a two dimensional plane, so the modernist device of splitting the picture plane by means of formal fault lines suggested the simultaneous presentation of multiple viewpoints, and opened the door to abstraction.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present a new series of stitched paintings alongside a ceramic tile mural and floor installation by New York based artist Sarah Crowner, in her first solo show in the UK.
Sarah Crowner draws on art, fashion, graphic design, theatre and performance to create dynamic works that recall 20th century geometric abstraction and modernism.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce a solo exhibition of new and historical work by Japanese conceptual artist Keiji Uematsu, his first ever in the United Kingdom.
Uematsu’s highly cohesive body of work spanning over 45 years makes invisible relationships between objects and the spaces they inhabit visible. The ideas of ‘de-familiarising’ space and focusing our attention on the natural forces of gravity, tension, and material attraction, whether through photography, drawing or sculptural installation, underlie his entire practice.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings by London-based artist Dexter Dalwood, his second exhibition with the gallery and first solo exhibition in Hong Kong.
This new series further develops Dalwood’s ongoing investigation into the role of images and painting in the construction of history. The context of China has provided him with a rich history to draw upon in order to make wider cultural, economic and political associations and provocations in this new body of paintings.
Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to announce Jeff Zilm’s first UK solo exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery, London.
Zilm’s multimedia practice investigates the slippage between technological platforms and ways they are consumed and decoded in the social realm. His best known ‘film’ paintings take as their starting point the physical properties of film stock and cinema as a material medium. Like the Structural filmmakers of the 1960s, Zilm emphasizes the materiality of film and its apparatus. For over a decade the artist has sourced 8mm, 16mm and 35mm black and white films for this ongoing project. Using a homemade bath, he chemically destabilizes the emulsion so that he can extract the filmic image and optical sound track from the reels of celluloid. The film, once fully extracted and finally in a liquid state, is then transcribed in its entirety onto a single canvas.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present for the first time in Asia, an exhibition of new works by New York-based artist Garth Weiser. Working in combined layers of line and colour, Weiser’s gestural and literal carvings cut up the painting in a built up tension between the intricate syntax of abstraction and the paintings’ physical surface. Marked by materiality, textures, burnished surfaces and a striking synthesis of addition and negation, the intensely textured paintings point to Weiser’s implicit observations of the evolution in the practice of painting.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings, wall work and sculptures by New York based artist Gary Simmons, in his third solo show at the gallery.
In his new body of work Simmons continues to excavate politics, music, race and class within American and British culture.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present ‘Faux Amis’, a group exhibition that centres on the dialogue between the work of gallery artists and their chosen ‘false friend’.
For this, the first exhibition to cover both the ground and the new first floor spaces of the London gallery, Simon Lee Gallery artists are invited to exhibit alongside, and in dialogue with, the work of an artist of their choice which they find forges a relevant, interesting, distracting, misleading, or stimulating relationship with their own practice. The resultant selection of works not only highlights the interesting discourses that can exist between artists of divergent practices and generations, but also suggests new readings of the individual works on display.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce the first exhibition in Hong Kong by renowned Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani. Associated with the Arte Povera and Conceptual Art movements, Parmiggiani's work resists a firm connection to both. Themes of absence, the inevitable passage of time, fragmentation and ordeal recur throughout his practice and are essential to his oeuvre, as too does his concern with the power of memory, poetic images and shared history. Parmiggiani’s practice demonstrates a profound interest in our artistic, historical and moral past. Deeply personal meditations on life and death, the power of reflection and feelings of the sacred are realised in concrete objects, photographic and painted images, and in his signature Delocazioni, made with fire and soot on canvas.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce an exhibition of new sculptures by acclaimed artist Angela Bulloch. Stacked columns of polyhedra, formed in steel, corian or MDF, populate the gallery space. Conceived and designed within a digital imaging program, this new body of sculptures, with their stylized geometry, electronic glow and manufactured surface sheen, might seem to channel New Wave Science Fiction - a genre typified by its imaginative, futuristic and often inaccurate notions of science and technology. Just as that genre’s writers accelerated the age’s visions of modernism, these geometric stacks suggest Brancusi’s Endless Column as if refracted through vector graphics, reinforcing a sense of ‘retro-futurity’. The temporality is confusing. Today, when much sculpture seems to be looking back toward the purity of minimalism, these works seem to refer to a later moment, when culture took imaginative leaps forward, postulating a world of stark angles and sawtooth synthesizers.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of acclaimed Italian artist Michelangelo Pistoletto, a key figure in the development of Italian art in the 1950’s and 1960’s and a founding member of the Arte Povera movement. The term meaning “poor” or “impoverished” art was coined to describe the practice of a group of Italian artists creating art who used everyday materials and found objects. Arte Povera rejected standards of artistic classification, seeking new approaches to making art and aiming to create a space for evaluation of the viewers’ responses and the art object itself. Pistoletto’s practice is profoundly driven by the belief that creative energy is linked not to the artist as a singular entity but as an extraordinary force capable of impacting every aspect of society. The role of the artist is dedicated to creating interaction between all spheres of human activity that make up society.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present an exhibition of new paintings by Mel Bochner. This is the artist’s first solo exhibition with the Gallery, and the first presentation of his paintings in London since the critically acclaimed exhibition Mel Bochner: If the Colour Changes at The Whitechapel Gallery in 2012.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present Elective Affinities, an exhibition which brings together a group of sculptures which share an interest in narrative and prioritise content, reference and resonance over pure form. Proposing an alternative to the drive toward abstraction and the evacuation of content, the works in this exhibition insist on their relationships to their sources and antecedents and combine physical transformation with continuity of meaning. Whether through performance or materiality, as replicas or relics, they force the recognition of the ideas and processes by which they are made.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present our first exhibition in the Hong Kong Gallery of work by the influential German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann. Characterised by its inquisitive and versatile engagement with art history and vernacular imagery, Feldmann’s conceptual work has developed over more than four decades. He has built a unique language through the reassembling of images collected from elements of visual culture and everyday ephemera such as books, magazines, family albums and postcards. With unexpected humour, wit and minimal interference, his works reconstruct the pictorial context and extend artistic communication beyond the traditional practice.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce the second solo exhibition of the work of renowned Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani to be held at our London gallery. The exhibition will bring together works in a wide variety of media, with a range of iconographic subjects and from a span of some thirty five years. What links them is the artist’s search for an image, an object or an assemblage which transcends time and individual experience to evoke a universal existential and perceptual truth. It is a search which goes to the heart of Parmiggiani’s practice.
Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong is proud to present an exhibition of new work by acclaimed artist Angela Bulloch.
This exhibition, the artist’s first in Hong Kong, will include a single large Night Sky work, all but filling one of the gallery’s walls. Alongside it she will show a number of new pixel box works fabricated in corian, sitting individually or in pairs on the gallery floor, or suspended from the ceiling. Alongside the exhibition the gallery will present a Drawing Machine at ArtHK.
Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong is proud to present the work of internationally acclaimed photographer and filmmaker Larry Clark for the first time in Asia.
Larry Clark holds a seminal position in American photography. Widely known for his treatment of teenage sexuality, violence and drug use, Clark’s contentious photographs and films are simultaneously unimaginable and unforgettable. Simon Lee Gallery Hong Kong is pleased to present selections from both Tulsa (1963 - 1971) published in 1972 and Teenage Lust (1963 - 1983) first published in 1983 and expanded in 1987.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present a new solo exhibition with the influential German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann. The exhibition follows the success of Feldmann’s recent travelling solo survey at the Serpentine Gallery in London and BAWAG Contemporary in Vienna (both 2012), which is currently on view at Deichtorhallen in Hamburg.
Feldmann has had a life-long fascination with, and an obsessive attitude towards, collecting everyday images and ephemera which he often assembles in the form of books, posters, postcards, paintings and installations. His works present a blend of readymade material and minimal artistic intervention, achieving unexpected, humorous outcomes that often verge on the absurd and challenge our aesthetic sensibilities.
Simon Lee Gallery is proud to present a solo exhibition of new work by Los Angeles-based artist Jim Shaw.
Shaw graduated from California Institute of the Arts in the late-1970s as part of a pioneering creative scene including Mike Kelley and Tony Oursler. His multidisciplinary practice proves as influential today as when he first burst onto the scene, as a founding member of cult proto-punk band Destroy All Monsters.
Almost 100 years after Duchamp's urinal and after Puni hung a hammer on one of his canvases, rebus considers the recontextualization and re-appropriation of daily use objects or images as an effective practice for delivering a subversive and critical message.
The use of industrially manufactured items rather than handmade goods or, as in the tradition of art, of objects, surfaces and photographic images made directly by the artist, represents a method and a system which in waves is ever present through the last Century to the present day. The object in question can be presented by itself, assembled with other objects, incorporated into a “traditional” painting or sculpture, manipulated, distorted, or framed within a purpose-made structure. In all these cases and any other variation, it is the context of the exhibition space which above all causes the work to be seen, enjoyed and consumed as a work of art.
Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present our first solo collaboration with the celebrated artist Angela Bulloch.
For this, her first solo exhibition in the UK since 2005, Bulloch will show an entirely new body of work that develops and de-constructs the ‘pixel box’ sculptures which have become her signature.
Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to present a new body of work by Italian conceptual artist Claudio Parmiggiani, one of the first exhibitions of his work in the U.K. During his time at the Istituto di Belle Arti di Modena (1958-1960), Parmiggiani frequented the studio of Giorgio Morandi, whose work was to have a profound impact on him. The spirit of Marcel Duchamp and Piero Manzoni was also apparent early on in his manipulation and presentation of objects, for example the arrangement of a globe and a pickle jar containing a crumpled map in 1968. He has never allied himself with any particular group, but he shared with some of his contemporaries, such as Michelangelo Pistoletto and Giulio Paolini, a progression from conceptual works, including installations, photo-works and books, towards a use of assemblage. In 1970, he exhibited his first ‘Delocazioni’, using powder, smoke and fire to make shadows and imprints on paper and board, combined with the subtle interplay of the architecture of the space created a sense of absence and uncertainty. The spirit of these early installations were to form the backbone of Parmiggiani’s practice.
Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to present its first solo exhibition of the German artist Hans-Peter Feldmann. His measured and witty method of assembling found objects and imagery from everyday life has extended artistic communication beyond the traditional practice. Since the 1970’s he has played an influential role for many of his peers and has been a prominent figure for a younger generation.
Larry Clark holds a seminal position in American photography. Widely known for his treatment of teenage sexuality, violence and drug use, Clark’s contentious photographs and films are simultaneously unimaginable and unforgettable. Simon Lee is pleased to present selections from both Tulsa (1963 - 1971) published in 1972 and Teenage Lust (1963 - 1983) first published in 1983 and expanded in 1987.