Exhibitions

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 delighted to announce Mai-Thu Perret’s second solo exhibition and her first at the London gallery. Mai–Thu Perret creates interdisci…