Draft:Adam Simon

• Comment: Could be notable but much of this is unsourced and contains original research which is not allowed. Only summarize what source actually state not you own personal opinion, analysis or synthesize multiple sources to come a conclusion not supported by any single reliable independent source. S0091 (talk) 19:17, 12 July 2024 (UTC)

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Adam Simon (born 1952) is an American artist and arts writer. His paintings, populated by images of normative behavior (as represented by stock photography), corporate logos and iconic images from art history, offer a view of human consciousness in the aggregate. He is also known for public projects dealing with the demographics of art ownership and the public exchange of art related ideas.

Paintings

Simon’s paintings since the 1990s have included three types of appropriated imagery, stock photography, corporate logos and images from art history. Images are transferred to canvas by rolling acrylic paint over stencils. In 2022, Christian Rattemeyer wrote in Osmos magazine, “The outlines, transformed into acetate stencils, were then transferred onto paintings, first as single forms and subsequently in a variety of increasingly complex fragmentations, duplications, and repetitions. In the process, easily recognizable shapes overlapped, eroded, or mirrored into near ornamental abstraction.” Paintings since 2022 incorporate fragments from past paintings, usually areas of overlap that were reworked.

In Hyperalllergic in 2016, Thomas Micchelli wrote of Simon’s logo-based exhibition, "Icons," at Studio 10 in Brooklyn:

"Simon paints the Nike swoosh as Gustave Courbet painted the seaside at Etretat — as a realist. And like Courbet, who scandalized the French Academy by submitting monumental canvases starring peasants to the Salon, his social scrutiny seeps into the works’ supposed objectivity. The close cropping of the logo enables it to dominate the viewer’s field of vision as it partially conceals its identity, enforcing its subliminal hegemony of visual culture: both there and not there, it quietly operates as the landscaped backdrop of our daily lives."

For Two Coats of Paint, in June of 2021, Saul Ostrow wrote about the exhibition, "AS/AS Adam Simon and Anton Stankowski," at Osmos Address:

“The convergent interests of these two artists, separated by 50 years, coming from two different fields, who had never met and were unfamiliar with each other’s work, may be written off as an odd coincidence. But, obviously not, in that the art dealer/ writer / curator Cay Sophie Rabinowitz has successfully placed Simon and Stankowski in dialog with one another. This was initiated by her knowledge of their common interest in photographic stock imagery, corporate logos, art-historical references, and geometric abstraction. What is of interest is how Stankowski addresses each of these subjects as a discrete entity across all media, from photography and graphic design to painting and printmaking, while Simon employs them all as the source of iconic imagery for his paintings.”

In the early 1990s, several series of paintings used sections of the New York Times newspaper as collage material and underlying subject matter for abstract paintings. Writing in The Brooklyn Rail about the exhibition "The Times," at the Flag Art Foundation, Tom McGlynn referred to a painting from one of these Times series:

"With a note of nostalgia, one sees in the exhibition references to sections that no longer exist in the newspaper, such as the classified ads that have fallen victim to contemporary digital platforms. Adam Simon engages this erstwhile feature in his ironically titled collage painting, Optimist (1992), by creating manic chains of circled want ads, interlocking as if the sky was the limit for the circler’s ambition."

Exhibitions

Simon’s solo exhibitions include in NYC; Osmos Address, Studio 10, Pocket Utopia, White Columns, fiction/nonfiction gallery, Pierogi 2000, James Fuentes Temporary and artMoving Projects. Group exhibitions have included the Newark Museum, the New Jersey State Museum, Neue Galerie in Graz, Austria, the Flag Art Foundation, NYC. Exhibitions connected to Four Walls occurred at Ronald Feldman Gallery, Exit Art, PS 1, (all in NYC), Kunsthalle, Vienna, Austria and Kunstverein Munich, Germany.

Public Projects

Four Walls

In 1984, Simon and Michele Araujo decided to dedicate part of their loft in Hoboken, NJ, to a series of one night exhibition/events. Dubbed "Four Walls," each event began as a typical exhibition opening but after a couple of hours benches were brought out and the viewers became an audience for discussions and presentations related to, but not necessarily about, the works on exhibit. Although the events lasted for just one evening, in the context of discussions, one could say that the artworks were looked at longer and more intensely than in a one-month gallery exhibition. In 1988, Four Walls exhibitions ceased until the artist Amy Sillman introduced Simon to Michael Ballou in 1990, who was interested in trying the idea in his garage space in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Simon agreed to work with Ballou to get it started, leading to an almost ten-year collaboration that included many exhibition/events both in Brooklyn and in Europe and collaborations with galleries and museums in NYC. The Four Walls archives are now housed in the Smithsonian Archive of American Art.

Fine Art Adoption Network

In 2006, Simon launched the Fine Art Adoption Network, in collaboration with the arts organization, Art in General, under their newly formed, New Commissions Program. The idea was spurred by the death of Simon’s father and his mother’s decision to move from Boston to NYC. Faced with having to take back a couple of large early paintings, Simon was torn between paying for storage or destroying the early work. He realized that his problem was shared by most artists, despite many people wishing they could afford to own original art. Under FAAN, potential adopters contacted the artists anonymously through the website, describing themselves and explaining what appealed to them about the work. The artists selected adopters from among those that contacted them but received no money in exchange for the work. Over several years, more than six hundred adoptions of art were completed, some internationally, most going to people who would not have been able to purchase the work. A book was produced by Art in General, pairing images of the work with the emails that convinced the artists. Only a few copies remain in print.

Other public projects:

Four Walls "Rambling Conversations"

A series of public conversations between artists that began in the Four Walls space in Greenpoint but eventually moved to various gallery spaces in NYC. Participants included Andrea Fraser, Peter Fend, Rachel Harrison, Dennis Oppenheim, Pope L., Joyce Pensato and many others.

Avatar

Avatar was a short-lived project, created in collaboration with theatre director, Marianne Weems. Essentially a talent agency in which actors offered to stand in as surrogates for visual artists in various public situations, including studio visits, art openings, gallery talks, etc.

Bushwick soap box

Conceived in collaboration with artists Jen Dalton and William Powhida, soap box was a series of evenings held at Studio 10, in which anyone could hold forth while standing on a soap box.

Art Writing

Simon has been writing art criticism since 2019 when a curator wrongly thought he wrote criticism and asked him to review a group show. Amused by the mistake, Simon decided to comply. His reviews have been primarily for the blogzine, Two Coats of Paint, but have also been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic and the London based Journal of Contemporary Painting. A series of humorous real-life parables were written for Cathy Quinlan’s blog, Talking Pictures.

Early Life and Education

Adam Simon was born in 1952 in Hampstead, England, one of four sons of Morris Simon and Josephine Simon who moved there from Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1957 the Simons emigrated again to Boston, Massachusetts. At the age of eleven, Simon was introduced by a family friend to the artist, Hyman Bloom, who was looking to mentor a non-paying student to whom he could pass on the mentoring he received as a young man. This began a relationship, focused on pencil drawing from the imagination, that lasted for four years. In 1970, Simon enrolled in the unaccredited New York Studio School where he spent three years interrupted by a year during which he lived in Boston and took classes in philosophy and political science at Boston University. Later education included a class in art criticism with Rosalind Krauss at Hunter College, and two years at Bard College’s Milton Avery Graduate Program for which he received an MFA despite not having earned an undergraduate degree.

References

Category:Art Category:Painting