PRESS RELEASE

“To eat well in Britain, you have to have
breakfast three times a day”—Oscar Wilde

Full English

Robert Goff gallery, April 24-June 12, 2010

A “Full English” at a café in Hackney, East London, means a breakfast consisting of eggs, bacon, sausage, beans, chips, mushrooms, tomatoes, toast and hash browns or a variation on the theme.
A “Full English” can take you in a number of different directions, not least depending how you eat it, when you eat it and the degree of alcohol you’ve had the night before.
Robert Goff Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition “Full English”, an equally excessive spread that includes the works “Lady Digby”, “After hours (in the Shadow of the bar)”, “Upstairs Downstairs”, “The Mouth of Rustling Knives”, “Alice Through the (Cocaine-Stained) Looking Glass” and “Guns and Roses to the tune of Kettle Song,” to name but a few. It is the first time the London-based artist Simon English has combined both drawing and painting into one show. It has been ten years since English has made works on canvas.
“Full English” clearly emerges through the lens of the artist’s singular life and is activated through the machinations of the artist’s subconscious and the performance of making. English opens up the very personal in a bid to reach out to a more collective and shared experience. “Like a good song, I aim to make my experience yours,” says English.
In a recent essay by Poul Erik Tojner on Simon English and Tal R, he writes “each in his distinct and very different manner, could be said to find and construe their work with clear references to their own lives. Having said that, it’s also to some extent clear what they are not: Art as social activism, art as entirely separated from the biography or even art as a commentary on art. What makes these two artists important on the contemporary art scene, however, is their ability never to let the private take the lead.”
In an Art Review magazine commentary on Volker Diehl Gallery’s recent version of this exhibition, Alicia Reuter describes “the artist’s loving and sometimes heart-breakingly unrequited feelings toward painting”. English himself describes returning to canvas as “feeling a bit like going back to an all male boarding School.”
The painting “Lady Digby (The Rotters Club)” references Digby House and Sherborne School, Dorset and allow English to return to puberty (and painting), describing growing breasts with bewilderment. The exquisite corpse of “Lady Digby” fights to find an ungainly balance between her male and female persona. This two-spirited hermaphrodite tries to reach reconciliation with her body and find a poetic alignment between drawing and painting. Her protrusive semi-covered form is ludicrously serenaded by a prayer for swimming trunks (taken from a section in Jonathan Coe’s novel “The Rotters Club”, set in a 1970’s school) – from Benjamin, who not only finds a pair of swimming trunks in the locker room but God at the same time.
In 2005, Simon English published his first monograph “Simon English and the Army Pink Snowman” (Blackdog Publishing) with extensive essays by Bill Arning and Stella Santacatterina. His most recent Shows in 2010 have included “Aspects of Collecting” at the Essl Museum, Austria with works selected by the Louisiana Museum in Denmark, moving onto Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark, opening in June 2010. A special 8-page feature in Mute Magazine, Volume 4 is due out this May. His works are in many important museum and private collections, including the Louisiana Museum (Denmark), The Essl Museum (Austria), the Israel Museum, Sammlung Falckenberg and the Burger Collection.

Read press release

Der Tagesspiegel, January 30th, 2010

WILD HEARTS
by Julia Brodauf

Simon English doesn’t exclude anything from his subject matter. He throws a wild orgy of cross references including Pop music, literature, art history, politics, history and his personal deftness onto the canvas and out of it creates an opulent, but controlled chaos. The British artist, born in Berlin in 1959 but grew up in London where he still lives, began his career in the nineties through the Saatchi Collection as a virtuoso drawer of fragmented smorgasbords and is guaranteed the support of large international collections. And so he self-confidently turns towards the two-dimensional painting and hurls himself into a kind of love affair in his current exhibition “English Painting (Below the Belt)” at Galerie Volker Diehl (Lindenstr. 35, until 27th February).

In fact these paintings sink into a flesh-colored physicality that no longer distinguishes between eyes and nipples. The painting is so close to the subject that even inside and outside of painted bodies melt into an indistinguishable whole. English dissolves faces, limbs, and organs into surreal shapes, as if these were self-contained digestive systems– there is even a portrait in intestines– while also work as diagrams simultaneously. He does this by employing a flood of individual drawings of figures, faces, animals and a surge of textual elements and illuminations to populate and cover this peculiar imagery. This way English gains back his distance from the intoxication; pop music lies in the paintings.

Read full article (German)

Die Welt, January 8th 2010

Willy master: Simon English at Volker Diehl
By Ernö Horváth
 

Not only the universe is infinite. The cosmos of the young British painter Simon English also seems to be limitless. Limitless in terms of knowledge, history, fairytales, historical authenticity, fictional stories, poetry and formative art. And limitlessly British. Something which is and was both commended and disparaged in Germany at the same time. 
Without interruption, English creates experiences that have been overheard, read, seen and thought. In his current work at Galerie Volker Diehl he even goes as far as incorporating previous works into the year 2010, and why not, it is easily feasible that a  work hanging in the gallery today will be painted again next year, in a slightly modified form of course . English’s thoughts don’t seem to be subject to any particular order. His sometimes enormous heads seem to simultaneously connect what is perceived in the morning (left eye) and experienced in the evening (right eye). And, as with Rilke’ white elephant, a willy resurfaces here and there. Well, it really does belong in the world.
Subjects span from Laura Wingfield’s wedding or Diana Ross’ baby. Philosophies like André Breton’s get their say as much as the painter Francis Bacon, the writer Evelyn Waugh as well as the fans of Tchaikovsky. English confuses, in the best sense of the word, and directs the viewer to the borders of his intellectual resources.

Artnews March 2010

Simon English's new paintings mostly resemble collages. With a characteristic mix of charm and obsession, they integrate references to poetry, authors, and music with allusions to friends and relatives.
Almost all the work here made use of an apparently endless variety of muted, fleshy neutral tones that softened the sense of conflict in the knotted imagery of fragmented forms, shadowy figures, and grotesque portraits. His style of "painted drawing" was exemplified by the opening work, 'Song for Painting (Galloway)', 2009. Emotional lyrics - "You are my first, my last, my everything", "I drew a line for you, what a strange thing to do", "What's this strange relationship?" - wrap around cluttered images rendered with rhythmic little brushstrokes. These lines reveal the artist's loving and sometimes heart-breakingly unrequited feelings toward painting...

Read full article

Art Review 2008

Walking into Simon English's latest show is - at first glance - like wandering through a collection of annotated Victoriana. For English's painted drawings (the works most definitely seem to sit somewhere between the two media) are assembled in a manner that is part clutter of photographs on a nineteenth- century mantlepiece and part Venn diagram. In each one, oval portraits (which include rabbits, fawns, artists, footballers, owls and royalty) cluster together like so many family histories, set into dialogue with each other both by theh ways in which they overlap and by the artist's scrawling annotations and (often sexual) exhortations ('Let go', 'Fuck me now'). But it's quickly apparent that these are a kind of bizarre, ahistorical Victoriana - a controlled vomit of references to past, present and future.

Read full article

Useless Magazine, Fall 2008

British fashion house Mulberry is known for its cutting-edge collaborations, and their recent partnership with London's FRED gallery is no exception. Five artists including Philip Jones, Simon English, Paul Hosking and Kate Davis have created their own totes for Mulberry, marking the start of the upcoming fall season. The bags are currently on display in Mulberry's Bond Street space, alongside specially designed FRED window spaces where each artist displays a solo show show periods of ten days from the beginning of September onwards. USELESS met with the artist Simon English, one of the project's exciting collaborators.

Read full article

Press Release

Goff + Rosenthal is pleased to present “Silver Spoons and Dirty Grooms”, the first solo exhibition of the work of London-based artist Simon English in the United States.

Simon English emerged onto the London art scene in 1994 with his first-ever solo show of large scale paintings at the Saatchi Gallery, part of "Young British Art 3". More recently, he has become known for large and small scale works on paper which have been described as being "painted drawings" and fit somewhere between the two. English uses drawing as, in his words, “a unique engine in which to power and fuel the subject of the work across the blankness of the empty page.” The work is deeply rooted in literature, British history and the artist’s rich personal and familial history. In Art in America of January last year, Ana Finel Honigman stated that English "resurrects lost images, connects loose references and makes beauty from pictorial chaos."

Says English: “It is a pre-photography art that stays close to writing and the journey of the imagination.”

The most remarked on element of English’s work is its Englishness. The drawings are a complicated matrix of literary references such as Christina Rossetti and Byron, of acerbic double-entendres, bawdy jokes and skewering wit, pastoral country house fantasies and distinctly urban pursuits such as orgies and gay cruising. Each work has its own internal logic, in which supposedly “high” and “low” become flattened into one scene encompassing a multiplicity of perspectives and desires. The content is both sad and comic, both prudish and perverse, in a way that is distinctly English: it is truly arsenic and old lace.

In “The Bachelor’s Wedding (A Suitable Match)”, the title comes from two romantic novels by the Mills and Boon author, Betty Neels. It refers not only to a small painting of that title that pre-supposes a wedding between Lord Byron and Lady Lamb but equally refers to the coupling of drawing sheets and the weaving of separate stories within the large scale works, taking an ironic nod at "English suitability". “It is a cacophony of different voices, songs from the past, notes from the present and rattlings of desire,” says English.

In "Jemima Puddleduck", he imagines an encounter between characters from Beatrix Potter and Michel Tournier's “Gemini,” in which they enter a forest at the same time , embarking on synchronized stories involving eggs, nests, the meeting of strangers and the eventual " innocent and experienced" entrance to the woodshed.

In “Silver Spoons” the symbol of the egg, and specifically a Faberge-like egg, recurs. “These eggs,” says English, “are large bold forms that carry bejeweled narratives upon their back. Eggs abound, from the ‘Nest egg’, a fictional story of embezzlement that makes reference to Robert Maxwell and rogue trading both in business and art to the ‘Parsons egg’ and its acknowledgment of polite society in the face of a rotten egg.”

In 2005, English’s work was included in the "Contemporary Erotic drawing" show at the Aldrich Museum in Connecticut and his monograph"Simon English and the Army Pink Snowman" (Black Dog Publishing) was released by with extensive essays from Bill Arning and Stella Santacatterina. He has had solo gallery exhibitions in London, Berlin, Zurich and, most recently, in Paris at Agnes b.’s Galerie du jour. His work is in the collections of Agnes b., France, The Louisiana Museum, Denmark, The Falkenberg collection, Hamburg, The Arts Council of Great Britain, The British Museum, The Paisley Museum Scotland and the Saatchi Collection, London, among others.

Read press release

Modern Painters

Read article

Nicholas Weist in Conversation with Simon English

Read article

Artforum Review

Read article

Die Welt

“I can’ t draw horses”
English Translation
DIE WELT
Published August 26, 2006

“The work of the British artist Simon English are wanted. Lisa Bosse explores the
discovery of the drawing.

Just recently in New York at the Pulse art fair a collector told me that he only
buys drawings. Why, I asked – because the artist is closer to the work.

Compared to painting drawings always have come second. A piece of paper
might not appear as monumental as canvas, but for me the drawing represents
the mother of all ideas. Whenever the artists is taken by inspiration or an idea he
grabs pen and paper. However, the drawing has developed into an independent
genre. Meanwhile there are whole exhibitions dedicated to the drawing and
Drawing Rooms explore the drawing in all its variations. Eventually the Leipzig
School is famous for teaching classical drawing.

Raymond Pettibon and Marcel Dzama have proven themselves on the
international market. And now the British artist Simon English is making an
example for how strong and expressive the drawing is. In his studio in London’s
East End there are piles of paper, drawings in fact. The walls are wallpapered
with unfinished sheets, hung closely next to each other and creating one big
drawing. One almost has the feeling English has taken his sketchbook apart and
pined it on the wall. Or is he working on a comic, in which each single sheet
present a different scene? Here and there are text fragments, written all across
the paper. No, those are the drawings by Simon English. Figures, portraits,
sketches of landscapes and particularly the horse are repetitive motifs. “I can’t
draw horses and I show this by drawing them all the time.” he explains with a
bright smile. With much skilled detail he creates figures and scenes which are
glowing full of tempting strangeness. The empty sheet turns into a stage on
which fragments of fantasy and memory are juxtaposed. Often they develop an
independent life itself and crawl over to the next sheet of paper. The language
English is using ranges from classical to casual compositions. The scenes are
loaded with sexual energy and describe a surreal quality. A man is being
penetrated by a twig and masturbates at the same time. Another figure shags a
teddy bear. Some creatures look like animals, however are abstracted figures. “I
have no idea how these contents come to existence. Every time I start drawing it
is like going on an adventure and I recycle past impressions and fantasy. As soon
it would start to become logical I would stop.” The drawings have no narratives
and inspire each spectator to find their own story within the visual experience.
One could go for a walk for hours in the drawn world of English and keep on
discovering new unexpected details: overlapping traces, crossed out faces or
whole surfaces that have been lost under thick layers of paint or have been
disfigured by marker pen. “This is where mistakes have happened and I let them
happen.” And already Basquiat knew, that a crossed out word draws more
attention. “I enjoy the dysfunction in my work.”

English was born in 1959 in Berlin. His father was stationed as a British soldier in
Hanover but died in a car accident when English was just two and a half years
old. After that his family moved to Dorset. English already drew as a little boy –
“like mad” he says. Books and TV did not interest him at all. Later he studied
painting at the Central School of Art (now Central St. Martins). However, there
have been other periods as well. His last gallery and collectors, too had put him
under increasing pressure to paint canvases – ideally large scale. Consequently
English hibernated for three years and today he only does drawings. “If I paint
today I deliberately do it badly so people don’t constantly ask me to paint” he
tells me. Today his drawings are in major collections such as the Saatchi
Collection, Falckenberg Collection and at the Louisiana Museum in Copenhagen.”

© Lisa Bosse 2006

The Saatchi Gallery

Read article

Modern Painters Book Review

Enlarge

Art Monthly, Simon English at Rhodes + Mann, London

Looking at Simon English's new works at Rhodes + Man, words like 'direct self-expression', 'instinct' or the 'unconscious' come to mind. Twelve panels hang from the walls of the three gallery rooms. Each of them is composed by 8, 10, or 15 sheets of paper of around 48 centimetres high, organised in (two or three) columns of four or five. English has painted, drawn, written, and stuck thins onto the pieces of paper, seemingly without order or structure. Characters and themes appear recurrently, and combine with each other dynamically, sometimes overwhelmingly so. Images of urses, horses, men involved in different sexual activities and big bunnies are mixed with references to literature (LP Hartley, D'Artagnan, Pride and Prejudice, DH Lawrence; popular culture (Julie Christie, Beckham, the Queen's dressmaker Norman Hartnell, Leeds United), and art (El Greco, Martin Honert, Degas, Henry Moore or Ellsworth Kelly. Furthermore, sentences written in the work appear elsewhere: 'I was four when my father was shot' (from Haddock, 2003) or 'I was three when my father was shot' (in Ansuya Bloom, 2002-04); 'The troops loved him' (both in Jean Plaidy, 2002-04, and Father Humpty, 2002-04); or 'The farmer wants a wife', in Father Humpty and Mrs. Brown, 2003-04.

Read article

Time Out