Adam Simon (b. 1952)

Adam Simon (b. 1952, Hampstead, UK), is a conceptual painter, critic, and director (together with Michele Araujo and Mike Ballou) of Four Walls, an artists’ forum and exhibition space, which ran from 1984 to 1999 and has been credited with being a pivotal force in the creation of the Williamsburg art scene. Simon lives and works in Brooklyn and Stamford, NY.⁠
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In the early 1990s, Simon began making paintings on pages of the New York Times newspaper, at first simply blocking out all images on the front page, and then implementing a system to color-code the subject matter of the images, painting them black (death), red (power) or white (human interest). In a 2013 review of a group show at Momenta Art in Brooklyn, Roberta Smith remarked that the “resulting pseudo-Constructivist geometries reveal a fairly evenhanded distribution of the different kinds of articles.”⁠

By the early 2000s, Adam Simon arrived at the methodology of working that he has remixed and refined for the past twenty years. Fascinated with the catalogues of stock photography (before Getty changed the industry), which attempted to index gestures, objects, and places into a metonymic archive of normative moments, Simon further concentrated these images into silhouettes. When a search for the perfect image of a vase lead Simon from stock imagery to a 17th century Dutch still life, he moved from paintings using stock photography (2006-2012) to paintings featuring silhouetted and stenciled elements from art history (2012-2013). As Brancusi birds and Magritte’s man with a bowler hat began to populate Simon’s paintings, their function shifted and began to represent themselves, becoming gestures of iconicity and branding. This recognition in turn led Simon to explore imagery designed explicitly for that purpose—corporate logos and brands—in a series of subsequent paintings (2013-2015). ⁠

As Simon moved studios, some of his stencils were lost or discarded, which he now regrets as a loss of his paintings’ history. By 2020, after unpacking his remaining collection of stencils in his upstate New York studio, Simon began combining stencils from his three categories: logos, stock photography, and art history. ⁠

Adam Simon’s most recent series of works further reduce his pictorial vocabulary into its most concentrated form yet. In works from the exhibition Great Figures (2024), isolated forms—achieved through fragmenting corporate logos and icons of art history—float against a monochromatic background, reminiscent of the sumptuous colors and bold compositions of Henri Matisse.