NYAB Event - Greg Simkins "Inside the Outside"

Greg Simkins "Inside the Outside"

Joshua Liner Gallery

This event has ended.

Joshua Liner Gallery presents Inside the Outside, an exhibition of new paintings and works on paper by the Southern California artist Greg Simkins. A fantasist at heart, Simkins alternates between the unsettling and the sentimental—in his finely rendered work, the grotesque can turn sweet and vice versa. Fanged caterpillars become sad-eyed clowns, grow machine parts, or inflate into bulbous balloons that sprout other bizarre creatures and beings. Simkins’ vision weaves together influences as diverse as contemporary pop culture, twentieth- entury fantasy novels, old master paintings, carnival kitsch, and cyborgian amalgams of technology and nature. With Inside the Outside, inspired by his recent travels in Hawaii, Simkins approaches a new dimension of fantasy—a desire to break down boundaries found in the natural world.

In these 10 acrylic paintings and 20 ink and graphite on paper works, the artist harnesses his appetite for fantasy to challenge the rigid, seemingly arbitrary rules of nature. Whereas taxonomy categorizes the biological world into evolutionary branches, and physics dictates who swims, crawls, and flies, Simkins’ art allows the artist to transcend these limitations to propose a new dimension. He conceives this body of work as reaching “outside” a conventional understanding of the world into a pictorial space of imaginative inquiry—in other words, the native realm of the fantasist.

Media

• Painting
• Other

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