Exhibition

Best known for his vibrant, unsettling oil paintings of East London’s urban landscape and the disintegrating office blocks and shabby store fronts near his studio, Simon Ling’s exhibition for Towner Eastbourne showcases a new series of paintings created over the last year, alongside earlier works.

The exhibition includes paintings of diverse subjects; slowly decaying logs, boats on a crowded waterway, anonymous segments of urban greenery, studies of a formally ambiguous object, or ‘portal’ constructed in the artist’s studio, and extraordinary paintings of skeletons.

In much of the work a method of conjuncture of separate parts combines to reveal a unique view of the subject. Through this, Ling’s practice seeks to include the animated nature of perception, the movement and construction involved in looking, and the creative position the mind has in seeing the world. Although the subjects are seemingly diverse they lead to a deeper concern that unites them and an engagement with the world that seeks more than just an image. Ling’s dynamic process of seeing, remembering and the act of painting is central to the artist’s work. His paintings resonate with philosophical questions concerning reality and the human mind, transcending the ordinariness of their initial appearance to suggest a transfigured world where the temporality of perception is as much the subject as the things of the world.