Press Release:

British artist Simon Patterson is to present Black-List, a major series of large-scale paintings based on film titles and end credit sequences, for his first solo show at Haunch of Venison London.

Patterson works in a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, film and architectural projects, and has an ongoing interest in film and history. In Black-List, the matt black canvases are screen-like in format, the text appearing to glow, mimicking the appearance of cinema projection. As David Campany writes in the accompanying catalogue, “The flat blackness of the Black-List canvases speaks of art, of Modernism in transition between the painterly surface and the industrial surface. The writing – so clearly cinematic – introduces what used to be called a ‘double articulation’: the already ambiguous black rectangles oscillate between canvas and screen.”

The credits that scroll up the canvases are taken from several films including Michael Mann’s Heat and Martin Scorsese’s Goodfellas. The artist has replaced some of the featured names with those of Hollywood actors, directors, technicians and script writers who, in the 1940s and ‘50s, were accused of being communist sympathisers and who were subsequently notoriously blacklisted during one of the most shameful periods of American history.

Throughout his practice, Patterson takes widely recognised systems and forms that we use to classify or understand the world and subverts them by inserting apparently incongruous information. By undermining our certainty in systems that ordinarily are not questioned, Patterson challenges us to make unexpected connections between concepts, people and information. By using forms that are so familiar and trusted Patterson’s representations gain their own legitimacy and point to underlying interconnections between seemingly disparate phenomena.

For further information and images please contact: Claire Walsh Call +44 (0) 20 7495 5050 or email claire.walsh@haunchofvenison.com

Biography: 

Simon Patterson (b. UK, 1967) studied at Goldsmiths College, London 1985-89. In 1988 he took part in the exhibition Freeze, curated by Damien Hirst. He was nominated for The Turner Prize in 1996, and in 1997 was part of the Sensation exhibition that traveled from the Royal Academy of Arts to the Brooklyn Museum in New York. Recent exhibitions include solo exhibitions at Fruitmarket, Edinburgh and Ikon Gallery, Birmingham in 2005. He is currently showing in ‘Eye on Europe ‘ at the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

He has had solo shows in major museums throughout Europe, America and Japan including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1996 and the Kunsthaus in Zürich in 1997. His work is included in the Tate Collection, the Museum of Modern Art, New York and many other collections worldwide.