Exhibitions

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, 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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, 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 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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, 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 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 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, 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 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.

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.

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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.