News

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce the launch of Paulina Olowska's book Her Auntology, on the occasion of her solo exhibition at Kistefos Museum in Norway.

Her Hauntology explores the artist's own fertile exploration into Slavic mythology and imagery, the female gaze and the concept of Hauntology; which refers to the recurrence of elements from the social or cultural past as in the manner of a ghost or spectre.

On the occasion of April Bey’s first exhibition in the UK, Simon Lee is proud to host a talk between the artist and Gemma Rolls-Bentley on Saturday 3^rd September in the London gallery.

The event will begin at 10.30am with exhibition viewing time, the talk will begin at 11am and will be followed by a Q&A session before concluding at 12pm.

Tickets are free, but confirmation of attendance is required, please contact: events@simonleegallery.com

Congratulations to the amazing Sonia Boyce who has won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation for the British Pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia. 

The exhibition On Fire, curated by Bruno Corà, brings together some of the most iconic works either made with fire, or that include the presence of flames. Naturally fleeting, with no form, weight or density, fire has always fascinated artists, both for its potential effects on other materials and as an active presence in works of art.

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of Ghanaian artist Serge Attukwei Clottey. Work by Clottey will feature in the gallery’s upcoming Art Basel 2022 presentation. The artist’s inaugural exhibition with the gallery will be presented in Spring 2023 in London. Simchowitz Gallery continues to represent Clottey in the United States.

Sonia Boyce OBE RA will represent Great Britain at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia in 2022. The exhibition will feature a major solo exhibition of new work from the artist.

For season 2022 in The Twist, Kistefos will present the first major survey in Scandanavia of artist Paulina Olowska (b. 1976, Gdansk, Poland), whose practice includes painting, sculpture, installation, and performance. The exhibition will comprise both earlier and recent works, including key works from Christen Sveaas Art Collection and Christen Sveaas Art Foundation, transitioning from a more traditional display in the closed gallery through to a dynamic installation-based presentation in the Panorama gallery.

This survey exhibition of collage work spans 30 years and features Marnie Weber’s resplendent, uncanny worlds that conflate the imagined and the sentimental. Tenaciously realized, her mixed-media collages are carefully staged and colorized dreamscapes inhabited by a wondrous roster of anthropomorphs and archetypes. Unreal Paradise takes us on a journey through absurd landscapes with the allure of desire, magic, and loss.

Dexter Dalwood’s practice presents an ongoing investigation into the role of images and painting in the construction of history. Reconstructing recent events of political and social relevance in juxtaposition with art historical, musical and literary sources, the artist explores the enduring relevance of painting as a means of communicating history and our interpretations of the subject. His cut-and-paste collage technique reminds us that if alternate realities can coexist within one image, then so too can they within both our everyday experiences and comprehension of past happenings. Dalwood constructs his paintings akin to how we construct memory, drawing together distinct concepts to provoke wider associations, encouraging his viewers to consider how actions, events and figurative images are understood. He invites us to reflect upon how we subjectively and collectively sample, frame, edit, crop and consume images in order to make sense of the world.

Benefiting the museum’s mission to support the art of our time, MOCA has created a series of collectible boxes featuring their world-renowned collection. The inaugural release features The Spirit Bear by Marnie Weber.

Artists Sonia Boyce OBE RA and Simone Leigh in conversation with Courtney J. Martin, Paul Mellon Director, Yale Center for British Art. Boyce and Leigh will represent the United Kingdom and the United States, respectively, at the fifty-ninth Venice Biennale, opening in April 2022.

In partnership with Barking and Dagenham’s Domestic Abuse Commission, Sonia Boyce’s Radio Ballad’s project invites individuals, community organisations and social care services into a discursive research process that creates a space for people’s lived experiences to be shared, listened to and made visible through collaborative artistic production.

Join us for a talk with artist Donna Huddleston and Katy Hessel, Art Historian, Curator and Founder of The Great Women Artists, on Wednestay 9 February at 6:30pm in our London gallery.

Paulina Olowska is acclaimed for her paintings, photographs, films and performances that often feature iconic women and engage with historical and cultural memories. This special conversation between the artist and Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick explores Olowska’s work alongside her selections from the Christen Sveaas Art Collection.

Paulina Olowska reveals the true nature of a gallery as a travel bureau, where works of art are portals into a myriad destinations imagined by artists.

Her installation of works from the Christen Sveaas Art Foundation is inspired by Orbis, the largest and longest running travel agency in Poland. Founded in 1920, its offices, staff and famously alluring posters offered prospective travellers a dream of escape. Olowska thinks of painting as ‘a beautiful metaphor for travel itself, a longing for a place.’

This exhibition will explore work by artists from the Caribbean who made their home in Britain, alongside other British artists who have also made work addressing Caribbean themes and heritage. It celebrates how people from the Caribbean have forged new communities and identities in post-war Britain – and in doing so have transformed British culture and society.

The Hamburger Kunsthalle is honouring Werner Büttner (*1954) with a solo exhibition on the occasion of his retirement, after more than thirty years of teaching painting at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts, and is showing around 100 of his oil paintings and collages from the early 1980s to the immediate present. As a painterly analyst and with a crisp sense of humour, Büttner comments on human activity and existence in his art, without regard for taboos. His paintings along with their titles present the contradictions inherent in attempts at reaching social consensus; they hint at the political incorrectness of the 1980s and disarm any fighter for an ideal world. The Last Lecture Show presents Büttner’s eloquent flood of images in pointed exhibition sections.

Post-Capital brings together works of sculpture, painting, photography, video and performance that address the nature of production, consumption and wealth. The exhibition takes as its starting point the inherent paradox within a capitalist system that is both dependent upon and threatened by technological progress.

Time Without End presents video works, multimedia installations, and site-specific pieces that are dedicated to the textures of time, history, and narrative, asking how time-based media generates memories. The exhibition features Valerie Snobeck’s video Go Soft, 2014. 

In a new series inspired by Mexico, Dalwood unites observations from his time spent in the country (whilst on a residency at Casa Wabi, Oaxaca, in late 2017) with his personal brand of ‘contemporary history painting’, which weaves together visual quotations to express a space or a place that is more an abstracted mental image than a representation of the real. 

Michael Müller is devoting himself to one topic for the first time. “Mensch, der / Körper, der die, das” illuminates various facets of physicality and our feeling for the body - a highly virulent question in times of genetic reproductions and operative optimization of the body, which leads to interesting insights.

You’ll Find Your Peace with Me is a screening programme of videos from the Mudam collection, organised to accompany Enfin seules. Photographs from the Archive of Modern Conflict. An atmosphere of anxiety towards the natural world is cultivated by João Penalva in Kitsune (2000), which depicts fog clearing across a desolate landscape as two men trade disquieting stories about a shapeshifting fox spirit. 

In No Thing is Waiting there are no clocks. The visitor is encouraged to consider time outside of minutes and hours, and instead in relation to object(ive) experiences. The past year has fundamentally changed how we perceive time, becoming ever more quantified by 40-minute video calls, 5pm press conferences and beer garden booking systems. But this is just our perspective. Bringing together 17 multi-generational artists, No Thing is Waiting proposes our experience of time could be reconstructed through engaging with artworks that embody processes and continuation. The exhibition aims to disrupt our habitual perception of time by rewinding bodily rhythms through the use of colour, shifting daylight, changeable sonic tempos and multiple viewpoints. Here, time is stretched, contracted, and relative.

The exhibition Cangiante – Based on the Caixa Geral de Depósitos Collection, curated by Antonia Gaeta, brings these elements together and promotes a dialogue between the various works, techniques and materials of the artists represented in the Collection. The exhibition’s curatorship is an open one and permeable to the work of the guest artists Ana Manso and Dayana Lucas about something that already exists, but which now has the possibility of being different.

The Foundation’s virtual exhibition series invites artists and curators to select 10–15 works from The Hill Collection that activate each other in new and unexpected ways. Without the usual obstacles of installation, these exhibitions give us the opportunity to see the collection in a new light.

Sarah Staton’s SupaStore is a trading platform for artists and ideas. Works by emerging and well-known artists are presented in the SupaStore series – an ever-changing display that has been hosted intermittently by public and private galleries, museums, and independent art spaces across the world.

Simon Lee Gallery is proud to announce The Axis of the World, a permanent installation at Houghton Hall by Italian artist Claudio Parmiggiani. 

The Axis of the World is a column made from Ombra di Caravaggio marble, anchored in the garden of the 18th century Palladian house. This seemingly infinite pillar penetrates the Earth, piercing its core, while simultaneously climbing over 16 metres in height to touch the sky, caressing the sun and the clouds during the day and embracing the moon and the stars at night. It represents an eternal column that connects the World and the Cosmos, Earth and Heaven; in the artist’s words, ‘A twisting tower, a work that raises high, that aspires to great heights, spinning around itself in its ascent without end’.

The London Calling exhibition  . British art today. From David Hockney to Idris Khan  brings together the recent work of some twenty British artists of different generations for whom the city of London has played a very important role in their artistic careers.

With new editions by Donna Huddleston (b. 1970, Belfast, lives in London) and Dorota Jurczak (b. 1978, Warsaw, lives in Brussels), Province are introducing two artists whose works often seem to exceed boundaries, adding theatrical, literary and cinematic aspects to their art, for example.

This summer MIMA celebrate one of Britain’s foremost artists, Sonia Boyce, through a sensory exhibition made through play and improvisation. A large sculpture by Boyce, based on the shape of Fool’s Gold, threads through the exhibition, interacting with artworks by 12 contemporary artists and selected pieces from MIMA’s Middlesbrough Collection.

How did we think about this 'Choreography of Attention'? How did we create a collective voice, from each other's perspectives? What ideas, negotiations and choices were made? In this guided tour, we will share the process of this collaborative curatorship project and introduce multiple ways of looking at the set of contemporary works of art that make up this exhibition.

Please join us for an exclusive conversation between Simon Lee and Andrew Renton on the work of Werner Büttner and view a selection of paintings by the artist on Tuesday 8th June at 4pm BST / 11am EDT on preview.art.

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of New York-based conceptual artist Mika Tajima further to her recent exhibition in the London gallery.

The anthological exhibition at the Municipal Museum of Modern Art presents over 40 works, including paintings, mirror paintings , installations and rare archive images, from 1958 to 2021 . This is the artist 's most comprehensive solo exhibition ever made in Switzerland , with the significant title La Verità by Michelangelo Pistoletto. From the Mirror to the Third Paradise .

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of British Afro-Caribbean artist Sonia Boyce OBE RA. Boyce has been commissioned by the British Council to represent Britain with a major new exhibition at the 59th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia 2022. Simon Lee Gallery’s inaugural exhibition with the artist will take place in London in Autumn 2022. Boyce is also represented by Apalazzogallery, Brescia, Italy.

Simon Lee Gallery is delighted to be participating in the inaugural edition of London Gallery Weekend, a collaboration between galleries across the city, held over the weekend of 4 - 6 June 2021. Alongside Werner Büttner’s ongoing exhibition No Scene from My Studio, the gallery presents Oh Adelaide, 2010, a video work by Sonia Boyce and sound artist Ain Bailey, which incorporates found film footage of the late jazz singer and entertainer, Adelaide Hall.

The gallery will be open for London Gallery Weekend as follows:
Friday: 9:30am - 8pm | Saturday: 10am - 6pm | Sunday: 11am - 5pm

The MEP is pleased to present a major exhibition bringing together two great masters of post-war Japanese photography.

The Moriyama - Tomatsu: Tokyo exhibition was conceived by artists Daido Moriyama and Shomei Tomatsu - before the latter's death in 2012 - as a way to celebrate their city around a first artistic collaboration.

France-Lise McGurn’s newly commissioned installation draws on her personal experiences of Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum; the hours she spent there as a child and then later as an adult, inhabiting but also observing. In particular, Albert Moore’s well-loved painting, Reading Aloud (1884), has provided a point of departure for McGurn: especially the very specific positioning and postures of the models, its textures and ambiguous lack of urgency or context.

Painting, along with sculpture, film, performance, and design, is a central component of the intermedia art of Heimo Zobernig. Since the beginning of his artistic practice in the early 1980s, the artist has built up a comprehensive painterly oeuvre, always based on his attempt to explore color like a “scientist.” Thus, in Zobernig’s work, painting has become a machine for the creation of insight. Characteristics of the artist’s method in this context are strategies of simplification, standardization, and systematization using predefined rules and the artistic appropriation of industrial norms and widespread samples (such as TV test patterns).

Donna Huanca presents a series of new work commissioned by Ballroom Marfa in her exhibition ESPEJO QUEMADA. Huanca creates experiential installations that incorporate paintings, sculptures, video, scent and sound. The profound experiences and memories of Huanca’s first visit to Marfa in 2005 inspired the work in the exhibition. The artworks draw on visual, cultural, and mythological cues informed by feminism, decolonialism and the artist’s personal and familial histories, while simultaneously engaging with the biodiversity, geology, and dark skies of Far West Texas. The sky was particularly striking for Huanca–animated with cosmic and extraterrestrial forces while also revealing the natural rhythms of the sun and moon.

“Stop Painting” is an exhibition conceived by artist Peter Fischli on view at the historic palazzo of Ca’ Corner della Regina, Fondazione Prada’s Venetian venue, from 22 May to 21 November 2021. The press preview will take place on Wednesday 19 May.

Tree Teacher Tree resides along a public footpath in a secluded hollow, a stream runs close by, the works nestle on the dell floor or amongst the trees, such as Fiona Banner aka The Vanity Press’s Rear View Mirror 2020, a reference to what kind of review nature might give mankind. Banner has also placed a flagstone with its own ISBN, it is an official publication in and of itself. Flagstones are usually associated with the city to keep the earth and roots below and things smooth, even and mudless on top, here the woodland floor can grow and envelope the hand engraved stone. Is it a tomb or a tome, or a story about concrete or footsteps or roots or routes taken?

The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce Deep Blue, curated by American artist Katherine Bradford. This group show examines “deep blue” both visually as a color, but also as a phrase that can describe more abstract concepts such as mood, the natural environment, music and even a region’s political landscape. Over 70 paintings, sculptures, photographs, works on paper and videos by 70 artists from the Hall and Hall Art Foundation collections will be included.

Featuring new and recent works on paper by leading international artists, the Biennial showcases every imaginable technique and represents artists from a range of generations, backgrounds, and heritages.

In their SCAD MOA exhibition Mainly for Women, artists Paulina Olowska, Karolina Jabłońska, and Natalia Załuska offer a dynamic range of female perspectives, creating an alchemical exchange of artistic approaches that reflects a complex and multifaceted vision of femininity. The collective presentation takes on an almost mythic, séance-like quality, with many of the featured works drawing from imagery related to pagan mythologies.

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of the Georg Karl Pfahler Estate. The gallery will present its first exhibition of Pfahler’s work in London in Spring 2022. Simon Lee Gallery, London and Hong Kong will be representing Pfahler alongside Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, Galerie Friese, Berlin and QG Gallery, Brussels.

Istituto Svizzero presents a new semi-permanent work at the entrance of Villa Maraini. The work consists of a newly commissioned neon installation by Swiss artist Mai-Thu Perret (b. 1976, Geneva). The piece lights the building and is visible for passersby on Via Ludovisi.

Untitled (2021) consists of nine hands, made of yellow glowing neon tubes. It almost seems as if they want to climb the brick wall in the entrance area of Villa Maraini, or perhaps climb out. Franz Kafka’s aphorism “A cage went in search of a bird”, noted in 1917, is important for Mai-Thu Perret in the development of the neon work. Thus, the question of the balance between cage and bird, the contradiction between freedom and protective loss of freedom. Mai-Thu Perret’s artistic practice is based on profound research and draws on references from cultural history, literary texts, feminist narratives, avant-garde aesthetics, and craft traditions. The neon work Untitled follows on from research on the hand, on hands, which Mai-Thu Perret has been pursuing for some time now. 

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to announce its representation of Argentinian artist Valentina Liernur.

Liernur’s practice is rooted in an ongoing exploration of the ways in which material can be rendered in the pursuit of painting. Often working in groups of work defined by a single medium, Liernur considers the physical qualities and mark-making capacity of oil paint on canvas in the same way she engages with less conventional materials such as denim and gabardine in other series. Shifting between abstraction and figuration, and often encouraging tensions and slippages to emerge between these modes of painting, Liernur seeks to manipulate and enhance the materiality of her chosen medium, embedding each work with a distinct, visceral quality.

The Musical Brain is a group exhibition that reflects on the power music has to bring us together. The exhibition is named after a short story by the Argentine contemporary writer César Aira, and explores the ways that artists use music as a tool to inhabit and understand the world.

Join traditional astrologer Miloš Mušicki, occult scholar Micki Pellerano, interdisciplinary artist Delia Gonzalez, and SCAD Museum of Art curator DJ Hellerman for a conversation spanning astrology and aesthetics, on the occasion of the Paulina Olowska exhibition Mainly For Women. 

Congratulations to Eric N. Mack on being awarded the 2021-2022 Rome Prize! 

This year, the gift of “time and space to think and work” was awarded to thirty-five American and five Italian artists and scholars.  Award recipients will be headed to the Eternal City this  September to begin their fellowship. 

Provisional artist list: João Maria Gusmão + Pedro Paiva, Sven Johne, Mark Lewis,
Melvin Moti, João Penalva, Philippe Parreno, Raphaël Zarka

Curated by Lauren Wetmore, Curatorial Reasearch Fellow

Screenings: 10.6.21 and 11.6.21, 15h to 18h
Online: 12.6.21 to 19.9.21

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.

Huanca’s two-dimensional painting practice is fundamentally linked to the performative elements of her oeuvre. Photographs of her performers’ decorated bodies are blown up and transposed to canvas, where they are re-worked with paint. Gesture is enlarged and amplified; the soundlessness of her performances reverberates across her abstract compositions. Featuring new work by Donna Huanca, the group exhibition Carnivalesca at the Kunstverein in Hamburg explores the meaning of carnival and how it has shaped contemporary painting.

Living a secluded life far removed from the art scene, Emma Kunz (1892 – 1963) exemplified an expanded concept of art, rejecting the idea of art versus non-art and instead opened it up to a wide range of aspects - research, medicine, natural history and the supernatural, the magical, the visionary. Kunz based her drawings on questions that she drew on graph paper with the use of a pendulum. The exhibition includes around sixty of these drawings, many of which are being shown for the first time. 14 contemporary artists were invited to respond to drawings by Kunz. The work of Mai-Thu Perret plays a key role here, as she takes a drawing represented in the collection as an occasion for formal reduction, abstraction and transformation into the medium of light.

The exhibition Que horas são que horas: uma galeria de histórias is the result of an invitation made by the Galeria Municipal do Porto to three curators to reflect upon the historical landscape of Porto’s art galleries – inscribed between the apparent post-WWII cultural opening and the retraction of the cultural sector after the recent economic crisis. Looking at this time period enables us to understand the many different sides of the civitas, and the transformative complicities that exist between the city’s artists, cultural agents and audiences that shape it.

Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to introduce Doris, an artist-run magazine edited by British painter Rachel Howard!

In advance of The Kitchen’s 50^th anniversary in 2021, artists and Kitchen Board Members Wade Guyton and Jacqueline Humphries have curated an exhibition of over fourty donated works. Proceeds from the sale of these works will help make possible essential renovations to The Kitchen-allowing the organisation to remain in the building where it has resided since 1986.

Heimo Zobernig, Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, has been appointed honorary doctor of Malmö Faculty of Fine and Performing Arts 2021.

Winter Light brings together artworks that take inspiration from light, colour and the poetics of space. Featuring more than 15 artworks and new commissions, the exhibition is installed across the Southbank Centre’s buildings and along the riverfront.

DecameronTV gets spooky with a series of “Halloween Specials,” bringing together five artists whose practices both commemorate and complicate the spirit of the Allhallowtide season. The artists use ghosts, monsters, costumes and the uncanny as strategies to remember the faithful and unfaithful departed, disinterring themes of family, colonialism, camp, and terror. Participating artists include Charlie Mai, Kembra Pfahler, Marnie Weber, Bri Williams, and Kandis Williams.

Glasgow-based artist France-Lise McGurn is the latest guest on DRAF Broadcasts: Podcast, talking about Art Deco painter Tamara de Lempicka’s drawing Sur La Plage, made circa 1926 when de Lempicka lived in Paris and was a prominent member of the art scene between the two world wars. This work from the David Roberts Collection becomes the basis for a conversation that touches on the female nude, Madonna videos and cigarette packets.

Merlin Carpenter’s solo exhibition, archive élastique, takes as its point of departure the Synagogue de Delme’s location, the road running through the village, on which numerous trucks and wide loads circulate. As the Synagogue is located at the roadside, the artist had proposed to transform the exhibition space into a warehouse or archival storage space, in which one finds thousands of boxes, awaiting transportation. Right in front of the synagogue entrance is a forklift, parked and ready to load the pallets into lorries for hypothetical delivery. But since no forklift of this kind can enter the exhibition space, the vehicle is doomed to wait outside.

Prelude: Melancholy of the Future brings together works by artists associated with MDD, either in the past or the future. The exhibition – the last at MDD before the museum’s renovations, until summer 2021 - considers the current challenge of anticipating on a future while the past itself is under scrutiny.

Known for her multi-disciplinary practice that engages installation, performance, sculpture, ceramics and textiles, Mai-Thu Perret derives inspiration from a range of twentieth-century avant-garde and radical art movements, including Dada, Constructivism and Bauhaus design. Occupying two floors of Le Portique, Mai-Thu’s solo exhibition Les Étangs is a presentation of new ceramics, patchworks and paper lanterns. Ten large ceramic pieces, evoking leaves of waterlilies, line the floor of the Portico, transforming the space into a vast imaginary body of water.

Lydia Yee is Chief Curator at Whitechapel Gallery, where she recently curated Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium (2020) and Is This Tomorrow? (2019) and oversaw commissions by Ulla von Brandenburg (2018) and Leonor Antunes (2017). Yee has previously held positions in the UK and US as Curator at Barbican Art Gallery and Senior Curator at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. She was also co-curator of Frieze Talks (2018–19) and British Art Show 8 (2015–16).

Merlin Carpenter’s “Paint-It-Yourself” display is to be seen as a systematic production and delectation of the materiality of a surface liberated from representation. It suggests that the tension of the painting process is already present when all is on view are eight primed canvases and a box placed in the middle of the room full of ready-to-use oil paint tubes.

This fall, Magazzino Italian Art opens a special exhibition examining the formal, conceptual, and procedural affinities in the work of Mel Bochner, Alighiero Boetti, and Lucio Fontana. Curated by Bochner in collaboration with Magazzino, the exhibition marks the first presentation to consider the American artist’s extensive, yet overlooked, engagement with the practices of Fontana and Boetti, as well as with Italian art at large. Bochner Boetti Fontana offers, through the artist’s perspective, a number of resonances between his work and that of the Italian and Italian-Argentine artists: an exploration of systems, language, and materials; and a sense of irony and humor, often and especially shared by Arte Povera and Conceptualism, as all these works opened the work of art onto the space of display. 

RED LIGHT presents a selection of works from the Norlinda and José Lima Art Collection, having as a common point the approach to sexuality, unfolded in multiple topics, both presented in a counterpoint complement and in a jarring confrontation: the representation of the body, male and female nudity , eroticism, fantasy, desire and pain, object and subject, pleasure and domination, the places of female representation, the male gaze, voyeurism, exhibitionism and self-representation in art.

Curated by Bronia Iwańczak

The multiple sources which McGurn refers to in the initial stages of her work most recently include films of the 70s and 80s, fashion illustration, advertising, pop stars and glamour photography. The generic features of the figures, accentuated by their repetition across the wall paintings, conveys a sense of intimacy or familiarity open to multiple readings. She also is inspired by people she encounters, studying their movements, mannerisms and hand gestures.

Busan Biennale 2020 examines the city and tries to expand the various spectrums of a metropolitan through artistic expressions. At Busan Biennale 2020, ten fiction writers and one poet were invited to write on the characteristics of the city of Busan as a conceptual basis for selecting the artists, each responding through new commissions and existing works within the context of the exhibition. The authors—which represent different generations, genres, and writing styles—have each created and written fictional layers around and about the city, some with direct reference to Busan, others through indirect and ephemeral urban tales involving the locale. Mixing past, present, and future, the artists and writers involved in Words at an Exhibition — an exhibition in ten chapters and five poems use Busan as a backdrop in ways that create a narrative that simultaneously combines reality, history, and imagination through experiences of contemporary fiction, a focus on soundscapes and film works, as well as paintings, photographs, sculptures, and site-specific installations.

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.

The Zënza Sëida Cultural Association and the Biennale Gherdëina are proud to announce the inauguration of the 7th edition of the Biennale Gherdëina on Saturday, August 8th, 2020 across the public space of Ortisei, Val Gardena, in the picturesque landscape of the Dolomites, the celebrated UNESCO Heritage Site.

Curated by Ana Rito and Hugo Barata

When applied to the curatorial situation, the concept of the constellation accounts for the dynamic definition of the relations formed between all those involved. On the one hand, it denotes the different contexts in which each obtained their previous meaning and function (which then change as a result of this transfer from other times and places into the specific new encounter). On the other hand, it implies that those involved and their participation are also characterized by temporalities of their own—historicity, sequence, duration, timing, rhythm—creating a corresponding dynamic in their interrelations.

From 26 July to 18 October 2020, the three visual art museums at the banks of the river Leie — Museum of Deinze and the Leie Region (Mudel), Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens in collaboration with Sint-Martens-Latem, and Roger Raveel Museum — join forces to present the 7th edition of the Biennial of Painting. Under the title Binnenskamers (Inner Spaces), this edition of the Biennial focuses on the interior within the tradition of art history and contemporary practice.

Works by Chris Huen Sin Kan will be exhibited at the Museum Dhondt-Dhaenens.

Artists Gary Simmons and Yuval Pudik join forces on a unique limited edition in support of Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and WordsUncaged, 'Simmons/Pudik, ACLU United States Constitutions 2020’.

This $250 unique edition of 50 is available for purchase now with all proceeds being donated equally between Black Lives Matter Los Angeles and WordsUncaged. 

SOLD OUT

On Sunday 5 July at 6 PM BST / 1 PM EST / 10 AM PST Gary Simmons will be in conversation on Simon Lee Gallery's Instagram Live with Tobias Tubbs, Chief Ambassador of WordsUncaged, a Los Angeles-based organisation that facilitates art, narrative therapy and new media workshops throughout the state correctional system in California. Please visit our Instagram to hear them in discussion about the key themes of freedom and democracy that are explored in Gary's forthcoming exhibition at Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong, opening Friday 3 July.

The international art project ROHKUNSTBAU is celebrating its 25th edition titled „Tenderness. About Common Living“. This year’s summer exhibition features artists that have been part of ROHKUNSTBAU in the last 25 years – ROHKUNSTBAU 2020 will be a celebration of coming together, of reunion.

Known as a master of snapshots, Moriyama Daido, one of Japan’s preeminent photographers, began his career in the 1960s. His grainy, high-contrast style, which came to be described as “are, bure, boke” (rough, blurry, out of focus), sent shockwaves through the photography world. Over the years, Moriyama has held large exhibitions at museums in a host of different countries, and received countless international photography prizes, including the 2019 Hasselblad Award, and today, 55 years after his debut, he remains active at the forefront of the art world.

In 2016 the Companhia Nacional de Bailado (CNB), the National Ballet Company of Portugal, performed “Quinze Bailarinos e Tempo Incerto” (Fifteen Dancers and Changeable Tempo), a ballet created and directed by João Penalva in collaboration with the choreographer Rui Lopes Graça. The performance is available to watch on the CNB website until 3PM, Friday 10 April. 

FRIDAY FOREVER the new album from Everything is Recorded is available now. Feat. Infinite Coles, Aitch, Berwyn, Maria Somerville, Flohio, James Massiah, Kean Kavanagh , Penny Rimbaud and A. K. Paul. 
Artwork by Toby Ziegler.

The Musical Brain is a group exhibition, including works by Mai-Thu Perret, that reflects on the power music has to bring us together. The exhibition is named after a short story by the Argentine contemporary writer César Aira, and explores the ways that artists use music as a tool to inhabit and understand the world. The featured artists approach music through different lenses—historical, political, performative, and playful—to create new installations and soundscapes installed throughout the park.

For more information, please click here.

Installation view: Mai-Thu Perret: Grammar and Glamour, Badischer Kunstverein, Karlsruhe 2019

Photo: Stephan Baumann, bild_raum

Pigskin sandals, commissioned by Festival Cumplicidades, presents a new version of João Penalva’s work Wallenda, from 1999, in which the artist whistled the entirety of The Rite of Spring by Igor Stravinsky. 

In this live performance version, combining voice with video projections, texts and recorded sound, João Penalva juxtaposes the history and process of his enterprise with the experience of dancers who were interpreters of the recreation of the 1913, original Nijinsky choreography of The Rite of Spring, by dance historians Millicent Hodson and Kenneth Archer for the National Ballet of Portugal, in 1994.

With Annabelle Barnes, Catarina Lourenço and Brent Williamson, dancers from the National Ballet of Portugal, and Rui Lopes Graça.

Image: João Penalva 

Unbound brings together a multigenerational group of artists, among them Eric N. Mack, whose work takes an inventive and experimental approach to abstraction. Using Kobena Mercer’s definition of ‘discrepant abstraction’ — hybrid and partial, elusive and repetitive, obstinate and strange, including almost everything that does not neatly fit into the institutional narrative of abstract art as a monolithic quest for purity, Unbound explores the continued legacy of black artists who have utilized abstraction as a nonconformist visual language, and a lens through which social and political realities can be understood.

For more information, please click here. 

Installation detail: Unbound, Zuckerman Museum of Art, Kennesaw, GA, 2020

Photo: Mike Jensen

To coincide with Simon Lee Gallery London's exhibition France-Lise McGurn: Percussia, there will be an artist talk at the gallery: France-Lise McGurn in Conversation with Katy Hessel, Curator, Art Historian, @thegreatwomenartists

The talk will take place Saturday 25th January, 12 PM, Simon Lee Gallery, London

Please note this event is free to the public, but booking is required: events@simonleegallery.com

Image: France-Lise McGurn, Fish, 2019

France-Lise McGurn (born 1983) is a Glasgow-based artist who predominantly works with painting to create layered installations that incorporate the gallery walls, floors and ceilings.

"In Emotia" is a derivative term which suggests a state of being, simultaneously emotional and in motion. Mcgurn’s figurative painting and wall drawings evoke bodies and limbs overlapping and interacting in ambivalent spaces, at parties, in night clubs, on streets or lying in bed either side of paper thin walls. Cities and bodies, are constantly moving and shaping each other, a sentiment which McGurn evokes through the shifting forms and gestures of her metropolitan figures. Often the works themselves overlap from canvas to wall to floor, creating energetic compositions which suggest intimacy, ecstasy, sexuality, violence and loss.

For more information, please click here. 

Image:  France-Lise McGurn, Easy Emotia, 2019

Photo credit: Courtesy of the artist 

During the opening weekend of Up to and Including Limits: After Carolee Schneemann exhibition, there will be a live performance of Paulina Ołowska’s large-scale outdoor work, Slavic Goddesses (2017/2019), drawing inspiration from modernist utopias in America and Eastern Europe to prompt reflections on feminism and consumerism. 

For more information, please click here. 

Image:  Paulina Olowska, Zaria The Warrior Goddess of Beauty, 2014

Jeffrey Stark, New York presents Nationale a solo presentation by Eric N. Mack.