SIMON BIRCH TURNER GALLERY
WILLIAM
In 2017, Birch created the socially engaged, experiential art installation The 14th Factory which opened in Los Angeles. Spanning a crosssection of his multivalent oeuvre, it encompassed sculpture, painting, photography, performance, video, and installations, leading one through a narrative sequence of a hero’s journey inspired by mythologist Joseph Campbell. Due to its popularity - the show was visited by over 100,000 people lured by word of mouth and the power of Instagram - further iterations of this ambitious and groundbreaking new format for art are planned to take place in major international cities and will be announced soon.
William Turner Gallery in collaboration with GuY Hector (The Art House Global), is pleased to present an inaugural exhibit of paintings by Britishborn, Hong Kong-based artist Simon Birch. A reception will be held at the gallery on August 6th, 2022 from 6 to 8 PM, the exhibition will remain on view through October 1st, 2022.
Basing his paintings on photographs he shoots, Birch then labors with study upon study of countless preparatory drawings, which he then resolves through the act of painting, translating them onto canvas. Drawing upon a vast repertoire
of painterly techniques such as scraping, troweling, scumbling, and brushing, the dynamic figures emerge in rigorous investigations of materiality in the plastic medium. His idiosyncratic palette is often punctuated with pulsating complementary reds and greens. The raw, unprimed canvases frame his shattered compositions of isolated figures within voids of negative space.
Born in Brighton, England in 1974, Birch has lived and worked in Hong Kong for over twenty years. He has had solo exhibitions in Beijing, Miami, and Singapore and has participated in group shows at the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Birch has been awarded the prestigious Louis Vuitton Asian Art Prize and the Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Birch has organized many large-scale multimedia installation projects in Hong Kong, most notably HOPE & GLORY: A Conceptual Circus (2010), Daydreaming With… The Hong Kong Edition (2012), and The 14th Factory (2017). He has been included in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s (LACMA) permanent collection.
Building upon and scraping away layers of paint he fragments into Cubist planes, the pluralistic impulses of creation and destruction conflate to generate what art critic Clive Bell theorized as “significant form,” provoking aesthetic emotion. Investigating line, shape, and color, his canvases oscillate between figuration and abstraction, dissolving features into the dematerialized ether. Mutable flesh becomes a terrain of primordial corporeality. Employing the Futurist’s “lines of force,” and the “fourth dimension” to express a veiled space, he illustrates a reality perhaps more honest than that of visual perception.
The Marvel (detail)
SIMON BIRCH
In this series of portraits, Birch materializes enigmatic, ectoplasmic figures in his psychologically charged canvases linking sympathies between external forces and interior emotion. These largescale renderings of figures in motion - are torn between attraction and repulsion as they twist and tumble through space. Birch delves into allegorical states of the human condition through his painterly poetics of cleaved color blocks disrupted with loose, painterly, gestural strokes. Intent on the inward, only vestiges of the external linger with allusions to what Hamlet described as, “the heartache and the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to.”
Coachwhip SuperCharger, oil on linen, 49”x100”
Shutdown Danger Pink, oil on linen, 78.7” x 78.7”
-Simon Birch
“What one does when one makes art is one presents a personal mythology. Mine comes from car crashes, monsters, spaceships, beauty, violence and survival. All the things that have informed and inspired me - they turn up in every brushstroke.”
Spellbound Fishscale True, oil on linen, 59” x 59“
Dust Ford King, oil on linen, 79” x 79”
Alone Miracle Dark, oil on canvas, 71” x 71”
Gold Kid Knot, oil on linen, 71” x 63”
The Marvel, oil on canvas, 84” x 84”
Red Collider Unseen Fox, oil on linen, 79”x118”
He Willed Himself Into Passivity, Became the Passenger Behind Her Eyes oil on 72”x72”canvas
Murkage Love One, oil on canvas, 30”x30”
Portrait of Map, oil on canvas, 30”x30”
Meridian Green Don, oil on canvas, 30” x 30”
Grindstone, oil on canvas, 30” x 30”
Portrait of Map #2, oil on canvas, 30”x30”
Doom Hey Blue, oil on canvas, 30” x 30”
Red Collider, oil on canvas, 79”x118.5
Money Folder, oil on canvas, 86.6” x 86.6”
Snog, oil on canvas, 80” x 70”
Layout: Rob Brander
Copyright: William Turner Gallery & Simon Birch 2022
SIMON BIRCH
Born in Brighton, England in 1974, Birch has lived and worked in Hong Kong for over twenty years. He has had solo exhibitions in Beijing, Miami, and Singapore and has participated in group shows at the Hong Kong Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Birch has been awarded the prestigious Louis Vuitton Asian Art Prize and the Sovereign Asian Art Prize. Birch has organized many largescale multimedia installation projects in Hong Kong, most notably HOPE & GLORY: A Conceptual Circus (2010), Daydreaming With… The Hong Kong Edition (2012), and The 14th Factory (2017). He has been included in the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art’s (LACMA) permanent collection.
WILLIAM TURNER GALLERYWILLIAM TURNER GALLERY
Photography: Rob Brander
Alone Miracle Dark, oil on canvas, 71” x 71”
WILLIAM TURNER GALLERY
