Simon Aldridge photographed in front of Kahala, Oil on Canvas, 2016
Simon Aldridge
Born in London in 1974, Simon Aldridge is an artist, architect, and designer. His inter-disciplinary practice merges conceptual theories with contemporary culture.
"London-born, Brooklyn-based Simon Aldridge pushes conventional limitations of monochromatic painting and minimalist sculpture through forms that function as a hybrid of these media and are simultaneously imbued with content related to everyday urban street culture."
- Anne Ellegood
"Shifting between a skateboarding vernacular and modernist notions of formalism, Aldridge...produces a delicate balance between accident and intention, structure and agency, theoretical intervention and subjective aimlessness."
- Jenn Joy, FLASH ART Magazine
"Aldridge engages age-old and ongoing concerns in visual representation. Like Thomas Demand and James Casebere, Aldridge creates conspicuously artificial representations of representations, manipulations at least twice removed from original sources: de-signified signs are recognizable yet freed from semantic anchors, querying the practice and validity of representation. Aldridge is also rooted in painting’s tradition of highlighting how technological innovation affects visual experience.
A few related examples: with the invention of one-point perspective, mid-15th century paintings proposed a manner of seeing the world with mathematical rigor; the 19th century invention of photography catalyzed new painterly discourses about light, movement, and realism; in the 1880s, optical and color theory determined the visual discourses of Divisionism and Pointillism; and, in ways that still resonate, the mechanical aesthetic and ubiquity of mass-produced culture informed mid-20th-century Pop art and its offspring.
For the digital generation, Aldridge engages this theme with the savvy anachronisms of his sources and technique. In his words, the paintings “highlight the fluid border between the artificial and the real,” but they also emphasize our growing inability to discern, or our desire to conflate, what that border tentatively separates."
- David Drogin, UBERART
Simon Aldridge’s work has been exhibited at Artists’ Space, NY, PS1/MoMA, the NewMuseum of Contemporary Art, NY, Mass Moca, and the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany. He attended University College in London, and Harvard University. His work is included in many important contemporary art collections including the Hall Art Foundation, The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Clifford Chance, John L. Loeb, Jr., Julian Lethbridge, and the Samuelian/Gonzalez Collection.