Simon Ling
The Showing Uv It
27 February–5 April 2015
Bergen Kunsthall
Rasmus Meyers allé 5
5015 Bergen
Norway
T +47 55 55 93 10
bergen [at] kunsthall.no
This exhibition of new and recent works by Simon Ling extends and develops a number of ideas and themes explored in the preceding group exhibition, The Noing Uv It, this time through a solo presentation of paintings.
Simon Ling is a British artist whose practice involves itself in a deep and extended engagement with painting. Ling’s subjects can often appear banal—street scenes, still lifes, rocks, stones or patches of scrubland—but through a process of sustained and rigorous “looking,” his works transcend the ordinariness of their initial appearance, taking on a strange and at times unsettling quality.
Looking and seeing are of profound importance in Ling’s work. This might seem an obvious statement with regard to an artist, particularly a painter, but for Ling the operations and effects of perception are of particular centrality. For Ling, looking is always an extraordinary act. Not simply a process of passive observation, but an active and deliberate thing; a thing that not only produces the world, but alters and disrupts it.
Many of Ling’s works are made en plein air: painted in the streets around his London studio, in more rural locations in the British countryside, as well as in parks and wasteland. But he also works in the studio, sometimes from models—which he constructs himself—sometimes from sketches or from memory. In this way, his paintings take on a composite quality, accumulating and collapsing together different kinds of experience, perception and time.
Across all of Ling’s paintings we see an intense engagement with objects (in their broadest sense)—their relations, realities, and our mutable experience of them. Each canvas might be read as a kind of “event”: between the artist and the world, as it appears in that moment, as well as through the vagaries and distortion of recollection and reverie. Ling’s paintings can be seen to exemplify this unstable, contingent quality of the visible, the withdrawn and flickering thingly-ness of things, the way objects seep and pulse with the mute but exuberant fact of their own materiality.
Simon Ling (b. 1968) lives and works in London.
Curated by Martin Clark, this is the largest exhibition of Ling’s work to date and his first major exhibition in Norway.
This exhibition is part 2 of I Aint The Noing Uv It Im Jus Onle The Showing Uv It, a major two-part exhibition at Bergen Kunsthall. Part 1 The Noing Uv It was curated by Martin Clark, Director of Bergen Kunsthall and the artist Steven Claydon and was on display at Bergen Kunsthall 9 January to 15 February 2015. In parallel with both exhibitions, Bergen Kunsthall presents a new installation of video works by Steven Claydon: The Fictional Pixel and The Ancient Set.
Publication
In connection with I Aint The Noing Uv It Im Jus Onle The Showing Uv It, a comprehensive two-part publication is being developed, to be launched later this year. Including full installation images of both exhibitions, as well as newly commissioned texts, interviews and contributions from a number of the artists involved, as well as Steven Claydon Martin Clark, Simon Ling, Martin Herbert, Timothy Morton and others. The publication will further extend and address many of the themes and ideas explored in the shows.
Editors: Martin Clark and Steven Claydon
To be published spring 2015
Related events
Opening: Friday 27 February, 8pm
Plattform
Simon Ling artist talk
Thursday 26 March, 7pm
The artist talk will be streamed live on kunsthall.no.
Guided tours every Sunday at 2pm
