Gary Simmons

One of the foremost artists of a generation which emerged during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gary Simmons has achieved wide acclaim over the past three decades for his work which explores the politics of race, class and social stereotypes through painting, sculpture, sound and architectural environments. Simmons uses imagery drawn from popular culture to create works that address personal and collective memories. For the artist’s first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth in London, Simmons presents a selection of new paintings and sculptures.

In this new body of work, Simmons employs the erasure of the image, a technique that has become synonymous with his practice, as a powerful and recurring metaphor. Simmons is best known for his figurative paintings in which white outlines of characters, scenes and words—based on 20th-century cartoons steeped in the racist traditions of minstrelsy, disappeared architectural sites, vintage film title cards, evaporating clouds of smoke and stars—are painted on chalkboard-like surfaces, then blurred and smeared by hand.

2023

Oil on canvas

243.8 x 365.8 cm / 96 x 144 in

In these multi-layered paintings, the artist uses the star motif to create works with multiple meanings. A universal symbol, stars take on many different meanings and interpretations, whether it be shooting stars or fallen stars, that imply inherent notions of hope, dreams and loss. A form of painting indebted to action painting in its physicality and gestural or performative nature, Simmons wipes the surface of the work while the paint is still wet to smear the motifs so that they simultaneously emerge and disappear.

For Simmons, the multiple layers of paint he uses in his works also carry the implication of multiple layers of history, whether it be in reference to the history of painting or of race. In ‘Smalltown Boy’ (2023), Simmons combines the star motif with the racialized cartoon character Bosko, who was created in the late 1920s and achieved popularity in the early 1930s, though discontinued in 1933. Simmons’ use of erasure in conjunction with the Bosko imagery references the attempt to cover up the engrained prejudices revealed by the popularity of such cartoons.

Though these subjects first appeared in his seminal chalkboard drawings from the early 1990s, this new series demonstrates Simmons’ exploration of painterly issues such as background, depth of field, process and layering, citing Albert Oehlen and Martin Kippenberger as influences. Simmons’ process involves a constant building and removal of up to fifteen layers of paint, exemplified in ‘Ghost Town Skies’ (2023), where subtle glints of yellow can be detected in and amongst the layers of monochrome paint, or through flashes of pink in ‘How Soon Is Now’ (2023). Evoking layered histories lying deep beneath the canvas, Simmons likens this effect to aged chalkboards, containing the traces of years of markings.

Using bronze for the first time on a large scale, Simmons has created sculptures for this exhibition that similarly cite racist tropes from historical cartoons rooted in minstrelsy. The sculptures are thus in dialogue with the paintings on display and were created with the gallery space in mind. Reminiscent of the heckling crow characters from Disney’s classic animated film ‘Dumbo’ (1941), two crow sculptures stand at a distance from each other, acting almost as outliers.

2023

Oil paint and cold wax on canvas

213.4 x 274.3 cm / 84 x 108 in