We are very glad to announce the sixth one person show by Simon Morley at taguchi fine art during above period.

Simon Morley was born in Eastbourne, England in 1958. Got BA of modern history at Mansfield college, Oxford University in 1980 and MA of fine art at Goldsmith's college, University of London in 1998. He works as an artist based in Allier in France, Winchester in England and Seoul in South Korea, participating artist-in-residence programs in various places. He also curates many exhibitions and writes essays in art journals. He is an author of a study on art history, "Writing on the Wall - Word and Image in Modern Art, Thames and Hudson, 2003"..

Word and Image

His work always deals the relation between word and image as: "VIRUS" - certain word is painted in characteristic type (each type has historical meaning) in front of its background with randomly floating multicoloured letters, "signature painting" - a signature by prominent figure is enlarged and painted on the wall of certain place to which the person has relation, "label painting" - hand painted labels to explain works displayed at an exhibition, "book painting" - cover or title page of a book is transcribed on canvas, "DVD painting" - a jacket for DVD of film or still of film with subtitles is transformed into painting, "postcard painting" - postcards collected from bric-a-brac shops are reproduced on canvas, a work in which photographs of gravestones and words from poems are combined into pairs, a video work showing 10 different mouths saying the last lines of Wordsworth's poem in slow motion without sound, and books published by imaginary publisher, Utopia Press.

MONOGRAPH

This time exhibited are paintings of the covers of monographs on great artists in art history as Sandro Botticelli, Paul Cezanne, Johannes Vermer, and so on. The book paintings relates the dynamics of seeing and reading, immediate sensual experience and memory. The subject of the books is chosen for cultural resonance and in relation to the specifics of the locations in which the paintings are exhibited. Colors are chosen intuitively, sometimes in relation to the books themselves, sometimes in relation to the place in which the works are painted, sometimes in relation to the group of paintings themselves. The text is always painted exactly same as the original books, only a tone darker than the ground in order to confuse the figure-ground relationships and to slow down perceputual-reading response. This new cycle, MONOGRAPH is a bit different from his previous book paintings. Morley intends to let the paintings more independent from the original books, only painting the name of great artists and the images, omitting the name of the publisher, author and editors.

Book painting is the most important work for Morley, long awaited works in Japan since his first exhibition here, "A Short History of Japanese Modern Fictions" in 2004. His video work titled ﾒLa Pittura dell Trecentoﾓ also will be on view. Please come to take a look.