b500 magazine
DAVID SIMON The Art Market
David Simon specialises in Contemporary and Modern British artists. He established the gallery in Somerset in 2006, after managing a gallery in Mayfair. The gallery, in Castle Cary, has a programme of monthly curated exhibitions, highlighting both emerging and established artists including paintings, ceramics and bronze sculpture.
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n a year of recovery, the art world has successfully kicked back with strength. With many art fairs cancelled and visitor numbers heavily diminished, online activity has been extraordinarily busy. International art fairs and private galleries have been re-opening and it is great to see some amazing public exhibitions launching this year and in 2022. Phillips Auctioneers set seven new records in the 20th Century and Contemporary Art sale this month with energetic international bidding. During the previous decade public museums, galleries and arts projects had suffered radical streamlining of public funding, so in these straightened times it is refreshingly surprising that last week Chancellor Rishi Sunak announced an £850m injection into Britain’s culture sector. The last two years have shown a significant realisation of how vital the visual arts are to individuals. £300m is earmarked for the refurbishment of public galleries.
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Pallant House, Chichester is an important museum gallery with an enviable collection by Modern British and St Ives artists. Their next show, “Hockney to Himid: 60 Years of British Printmaking” runs Saturday 13 November – Sunday 24 April. From early etchings by David Hockney to Lubaina Himid’s poetic lithographs, the exhibition will plot the remarkable changes in British printmaking from the post war period to the present day. It has been interesting to see the rise in popularity of works of art on paper over the past ten years. As an extremely accessible way of acquiring artworks by world famous artists, this area has become increasingly popular and a commodity that promises to continue to be a wise and lucrative investment. This year David Simon Contemporary held two major
Raoul Dufy (1877-1953) Marseilles Harbour, 1925 lithograph on BFK Rives wove paper edition of 33 33 x 42.2cm (plate), 50.5 x 55.5cm (paper)
exhibitions of Twentieth Century works – “Picasso & Sylvette” in May was a selling exhibition of works on paper by Pablo Picasso alongside a range of paintings by Lydia Corbett (AKA Sylvette), with some thirty works by Picasso from the 1920s to the 1970s. Corbett is one of the last surviving models of Picasso, known as ‘The Girl with the Ponytail’ and is a successful artist in her own right. October saw ‘School of Paris’, an exhibition with original, signed works on paper by Georges Braque, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dali, Raoul Dufy, Réne Magritte, Henri Matisse, Joan Miró and Pablo Picasso. The Twentieth Century was, of course, an extraordinary time for Europe, with two World Wars and the Spanish Civil War. A number of Catalonian artists including Salvador Dali and Joan Miró fled to Paris. This was a time where artists sought both
Patrick Heron (1920-1999) January 1973, Plate 5, 1973 screenprint, Artist’s Proof, edition of 72 68 x 92.3 (paper), 58.6 x 81.4cm (plate)
