Simon Martin

The inaugural exhibition at the gallery is a solo show by Simon Martin. The show will consist of a painting, a sculpture, and something half-way between the two.

To trace a line of production, Martin begins with a manageable germ of an idea which could unfold to become not much more than a monochrome painting. However, Martin pursues these germinal thoughts with a neurotic persistence, arriving at far less expected conclusions. One work for example, ‘The Monkiness of Whatness is all Monkey’(2003), is a large almost perfectly spherical chimpanzee’s head.

The works can take considerable time to make, involving an elaborate expenditure of effort of the kind one associates with something like Charles Ray’s Unpainted Sculpture. This expenditure has something of a Sisyphean tragedy about it, although with the Greek myth perhaps better served in Martin’s case by the image of Laurel and Hardy carrying a grand piano up a steep flight of stairs.