Exhibitions

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 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 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 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 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.  

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 20^th 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 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 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 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 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 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.

Book a visit

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 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 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.

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 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, 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 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, 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 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, 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 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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 20^th 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 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 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 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 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 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 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.