Draft:Adam Simon

Adam Simon (born 1952) is an American artist and arts writer. His paintings feature manipulations of stock photography, corporate logos, and images from art history. His primary subject is how universally recognized signs and symbols intersect with individual identity. He is also known for organizing exhibitions and public projects that explore the demographics of art ownership and the public exchange of art related ideas.

Paintings
Simon’s paintings since the 1990s have included three types of appropriated imagery, stock photography, corporate logos and images from art history. Images are transferred to canvas by rolling acrylic paint over stencils. In 2022, Christian Rattemeyer wrote in Osmos magazine, “The outlines, transformed into acetate stencils, were then transferred onto paintings, first as single forms and subsequently in a variety of increasingly complex fragmentations, duplications, and repetitions. In the process, easily recognizable shapes overlapped, eroded, or mirrored into near ornamental abstraction.” Paintings since 2022 incorporate fragments from past paintings, usually areas of overlap that were reworked.

In Hyperalllergic in 2016, Thomas Micchelli wrote of Simon’s logo-based exhibition, "Icons," at Studio 10 in Brooklyn:

"Simon paints the Nike swoosh as Gustave Courbet painted the seaside at Etretat — as a realist. And like Courbet, who scandalized the French Academy by submitting monumental canvases starring peasants to the Salon, his social scrutiny seeps into the works’ supposed objectivity. The close cropping of the logo enables it to dominate the viewer’s field of vision as it partially conceals its identity, enforcing its subliminal hegemony of visual culture: both there and not there, it quietly operates as the landscaped backdrop of our daily lives."

For Two Coats of Paint, in June of 2021, Saul Ostrow wrote about the exhibition, "AS/AS Adam Simon and Anton Stankowski," at Osmos Address:

“The convergent interests of these two artists, separated by 50 years, coming from two different fields, who had never met and were unfamiliar with each other’s work, may be written off as an odd coincidence. But, obviously not, in that the art dealer/ writer / curator Cay Sophie Rabinowitz has successfully placed Simon and Stankowski in dialog with one another. This was initiated by her knowledge of their common interest in photographic stock imagery, corporate logos, art-historical references, and geometric abstraction. What is of interest is how Stankowski addresses each of these subjects as a discrete entity across all media, from photography and graphic design to painting and printmaking, while Simon employs them all as the source of iconic imagery for his paintings.”

In the early 1990s, several series of paintings used sections of the New York Times newspaper as collage material and underlying subject matter for abstract paintings. Writing in The Brooklyn Rail about the exhibition "The Times," at the Flag Art Foundation, Tom McGlynn referred to a painting from one of these Times series:

"With a note of nostalgia, one sees in the exhibition references to sections that no longer exist in the newspaper, such as the classified ads that have fallen victim to contemporary digital platforms. Adam Simon engages this erstwhile feature in his ironically titled collage painting, Optimist (1992), by creating manic chains of circled want ads, interlocking as if the sky was the limit for the circler’s ambition."

Exhibitions
Simon’s work has been featured in exhibitions at Carriage Trade (New York, NY), Studio 10 (Brooklyn, NY), Galerie Richard (New York, NY), Minus Space (Brooklyn, NY), The FLAG Art Foundation (New York, NY), Steven Kasher Gallery (New York, NY), Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) (Santa Fe, NM), and Leley Heller Gallery (New York, NY). From 2012 to 2021, Simon was affiliated with Studio 10 (Bushwick, NY), where he had three solo shows.

Public Projects
Four Walls

From 1984-1988, In Hoboken, NJ, Adam Simon and Michele Araujo organized artist gatherings called "Four Walls." In 1990, Four Walls reemerged in Greenpoint, Brooklyn, with co-organizer Michael Ballou in Greenpoint, Brooklyn., presenting one-night artist events through 1998. The Four Walls archives are now housed in the Smithsonian Archive of American Art.

Fine Art Adoption Network

Simon was thinking about what happens to all the artists' work that goes unsold and he came up with an idea to put people who want art but may not be able to afford it in touch with artists who had a surplus of work in their studios. In 2006, the Fine Art Adoption Network was launched as part of the New Commissions Program at Art in General. Hundreds of artworks were placed. Art in General produced a book that paired images of the artwork with the emails that hopeful art collectors sent to the artists to convince them to approve their adoption requests. Only a few copies remain in print.

Patricia Milder wrote that the project was part of the artist's art practice:

"Simon prefers to look at the network not as some sort of intentional social sculpture but as a natural outgrowth of his work as a painter. The idea that this kind of social project is historically at odds with an object-oriented studio practice seems to weigh on him, but the ease with which F.A.A.N. fits into today’s art world reflects the waning ghettoization of forms. In a sense, it is the perfect performance document. By imbuing art objects with the essence of a progressive social experiment and performative life event, an object transcends, even further, the materials with which it was created."

Art Writing
Simon has been writing art criticism since 2019. His reviews have been primarily for the blogzine, Two Coats of Paint, but have also been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Hyperallergic and the London based Journal of Contemporary Painting. A series of humorous real-life parables were written for Cathy Quinlan’s blog, Talking Pictures.

Early Life
Adam Simon was born in 1952 in Hampstead, England, one of four sons of Morris Simon and Josephine Simon who moved there from Johannesburg, South Africa. In 1957 the Simons emigrated again to Boston, Massachusetts, where his father was a professor of radiology at Harvard Medical School and inventor of medical devices. His brothers are artist Jason Simon, publisher Dan Simon, and teacher and labor organizer Mark Simon.