In Gary Simmons’ new show, ‘This Must Be the Place’ at Hauser & Wirth, London, the artist explores the process of cultural erasure, and the traces it leaves behind
, which features a series of paintings and his first large sculptural works, contains all the motifs we would expect from Simmons. We see a layered and scraped-back painting featuring a blurred ‘Bosko’, the racist 1930scharacter, a sculpture of the famous crows from Dumbo and a series of black and white stars, blurred by hand.
‘I don't want people to not remember or idealise moments. I think that we have a way, whether it's a cartoon or an event, of treating it; if it was good then we sort of even make it bigger than it was, if it was bad, we make it worse than it was. I guess the nature of memory is to abstract it and it never gets fixed… We take a photograph to preserve a moment, but that's a distortion of that moment…Disney and cartoons are like that.
Simmons describes these elements of the cultural landscape as ghosts haunting the common consciousness and captures them in canvas form. ‘Some of the backgrounds take such a long time to develop and I never really know truly where they're going,’ Simmons explains. ‘It just keeps going and then the painting just tells me when it's ready for what sits on top of it. It creates this sense of depth. I think that the haunting comes in when those colours flash as those moments pop out.
Sometimes these flashes are not tropes but stars; be they shooting stars, star showers or a lone black or white star, they sum up the space between the magical and the tragic, flaming out as they cross the sky. Flanked by the birds evoking Jim Crow and Hitchcock’s, these paintings show an optimistic side to this radical artist even when cohabiting with more sinister elements of history.
Installation view, ‘Gary Simmons. This Must Be the Place’ at Hauser & Wirth London until 29 July 2023Installation view, ‘Gary Simmons. This Must Be the Place’ at Hauser & Wirth London until 29 July 2023
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