Exhibitions

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 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.