'When you attempt to erase something, there's always a trace left behind.'— Gary Simmons
Hauser & Wirth returns to West Bund Art & Design this year with a solo presentation by Gary Simmons. Highlighting a range of selected works from the 1990s to brand new paintings, the presentation offers an overview of characteristic motifs explored throughout Simmons' practice: chalkboards, burning architecture, haunting chandeliers, shooting stars and cartoon imagery.
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. Drawing imagery from popular culture, Simmons creates works that address both personal and collective memories.
Works from Simmons' early series of chalkboard drawings will be on display, such as the rarely seen White Chalkboard Triptych (1993). Simmons began using classroom chalkboards in 1989 when his studio was located in a vocational school cluttered with furnishings that had been left behind. Symbolic of the formative time in which history is taught to young minds—shaping and marking their worldview—the chalkboards became a foundational aspect of Simmons' practice, investigating and recontextualizing the biases of the American educational system and the stereotypes embedded in American popular culture.
Simmons' use of pedagogical motifs such as the readymade chalkboards led to the formal and aesthetic breakthrough that would inform much of his subsequent work, in which erasure of the image has been a powerful and recurring theme. 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 drawn or painted then blurred and smeared by hand. The tropes of erasure and ephemerality suggest the fleeting nature of memory and histories re-written while the physical trace of erasing left behind by the artist becomes a form of mark-making in and of itself. Through his work, Simmons has enacted the idea of erasure as it pertains to African American history and culture. He employs popular culture—drawing from sports, music, films and cartoons—to unveil how the national character of the United States is constructed.
The city of Los Angeles, where Simmons currently lives, often features in the artist's practice. Shapes of the metropolis appear in pale outlines smudged to resemble smoke or flames. These paintings, including Public Housing Meltdown (2009), reference Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972), a film based on the 1965 Watts Rebellion in Los Angeles, and evoke storefronts burned during the deadly rebellions of 1965 and 1992 when the city was consumed by social, racial, and economic discord. Landmark buildings that make up the fabric of Los Angeles are depicted mid-destruction, turning the cityscape into an apt metaphor for the ongoing violence of political and socioeconomic inequalities in America.
In his large-scale, 12-panel work Chandelier Hallway (White) (2011), Simmons depicts three chandeliers that reference a scene from The Shining (1980)—an American cultural touchstone. At once foreboding and ominous yet simultaneously hypnotic, Simmons imbues the chandeliers—architectural signifiers of class and wealth—with a chaotic tension unique to the artist's touch.
In a more recent body of work, Simmons revisits the star motif to create multi-layered paintings with multiple nuanced meanings. A universal symbol, the star can take on many different interpretations, whether it be shooting stars or fallen stars, that imply inherent notions of hope, dreams, loss, and deception. In Once in a Lifetime (2023), Simmons wipes the layered surface of the work while the paint is still wet to smear the star motif, allowing it to seem caught between two states—simultaneously emerging and disappearing.
For Simmons, the multiple layers of paint that mark his practice also carry the implication of multiple layers of history, whether it be in reference to the history of painting or of race. In the artist's latest works, archetypal racist cartoon characters such as Bosko and Honey from the Looney Toons franchise have been reintroduced after first appearing in his early chalkboard drawings. In works such as Edge Jump (2023), Simmons evokes the stratified history of American culture and captures through formal and painterly means the effect of decades of erasure and altered history as experienced by Black communities. Simmons forces the viewer to confront the realities of the United States' dark past by using erasure to powerfully deface and control the image whilst also referencing the attempt to cover up the engrained prejudices revealed by the popularity of such cartoons.
Date
9–12 November 2023
Location
West Bund Art Center
2555 Longteng Ave, Xuhui District,
Shanghai, China