NYAB Event - Adam Simon “Icons”

Adam Simon “Icons”

Studio 10

This event has ended.

Studio10 presents ICONS, a solo exhibition of paintings and graphite drawings by New York based artist Adam Simon.

Logos are designed to be read quickly – to grab a fast paced public in an instant of distraction and enter the subconscious. Adam Simon’s large works catch the eye in a similar fashion before shifting into something else - paintings that have a slow and deliberate focus on color, tactility and almost familiar abstract motifs — before transforming back into logos again.

This oscillation is echoed in a push and pull between background and foreground that allows the paintings to read as double images; the negative space and the logo alternate on the surface – first one pushing forward, then the other. This friction between two images on a surface hints at a further duality – the conception of “logo” as outside of history, and the reality that these emblems belong to our collective memory. Like icons from earlier times, they are images that are imposed on a public, which then claims them as its own.

The paintings seem initially to be devoid of error – brushstrokes are not evident in the manipulation of the paint. But marks and vestigial colors emerge subtly through the flatness in places where they were allowed to remain, evidence of the history of the making of a surface.

In conjunction with the exhibition, Keith Sanborn has written a monograph, From Nike to Nikephoros to NIKE, further exploring the archaeology of logos in relation to Simon’s paintings.

Adam Simon is a painter living in Brooklyn, New York. This will be his third solo exhibition at Studio 10 gallery.
Keith Sanborn is a media artist, theorist and translator based in New York.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing

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