NYAB Event - Harvey Low Simons "The Wolf Howled Under the Leaves And Spit Out the Prettiest Feathers"

Harvey Low Simons "The Wolf Howled Under the Leaves And Spit Out the Prettiest Feathers"

57 STUX + HALLER Gallery

This event has ended.

The title of the exhibition comes from a poem by Arthur Rimbaud, capturing the oscillation between the visceral and the aesthetic that propels Simons’ paintings. Using a broad-ranging palette of colors, the initially expansive mood of these works darkens as they explore a surprisingly deep well of themes that embrace the mystical and the legendary. Recognizable fragments of the human form—a glimpse of a face here, the span of a muscled arm there—are confounded by shifting fields of abstract form, decomposing into clouds of color, merging with forms of animals that themselves ultimately give way to uncertain landscapes that are ultimately as macabre as they are beautiful. The painterly play of signification found in Cecily Brown’s work here is given a sharp Symbolist/Surrealist twist, historically reminiscent at times of the visionary feel of Odilon Redon. Taking as its subject the fundamental relationships between representation and the real, between thought and action, Simons plumbs a boundless, visceral, dreamy yet wicked world that makes manifest the surprising violence of the virtual, through its incarnation in the very materiality of painting itself.