Joshua Liner Gallery

Press Release

Joshua Liner Gallery is pleased to present "It Wanders East," an exhibition of new paintings by the Los Angeles-based artist Greg Simkins. This is Simkins' first solo show with the gallery.

With his dazzlingly macabre and admittedly warped imagination, Simkins participates in the long tradition of popular fantasists that includes Edward Gorey, Stan Lee, and Tim Burton. Simkins' world is a troubled nether region of hybrid creatures—part fairytale, part science fiction. This encompassing vision looks back to the rich history of fantasy illustration while also prefiguring unsettling hypotheses for an imagined evolutionary future.

In Simkins' large, finely wrought paintings, fantastical characters with symbolic accessories are arranged in quasi-narrative still-lifes that spread opulently across the picture surface. In Duchess Dreaming, for example, a delicate waif with spindly arms and tentacles for feet is joined by a moth, dragon, book, and assorted fruits atop a pedestal, where creamy, blood-speckled smoke billows from a giant egg. Other works depict clouds studded with the menacing beaks of surreal birds (Never Alone) or a two-headed clown teetering on a precipitous cliff (Judge and Jury).

Simkins' grotesque, sumptuous, and often humorous imagery is painstakingly rendered in the mannerist style of Arcimboldo and Hieronymus Bosch, but the contents of his dreamlike tableaux are lifted from the contemporary unconscious—nightmares of toxic landscapes, bioengineered nature, and pop-culture decadence. His blending of organic forms with the appearance of manufactured surfaces suggests technology run amok and a natural world in accelerated flux. Like other artists of his generation, Simkins honed his unique approach in the public arena as the West Coast graffiti artist known as Craola.

Born in 1975 in Torrance, California, Greg Simkins received a BA in Studio Art from California State University of Long Beach. Solo exhibitions of his work have taken place in California at m modern Gallery, Palm Springs (2008); Gallery Nineteen Eighty Eight, Los Angeles (2006 and 2007); and FIFTY24SF Gallery, San Francisco (2007). Selected group exhibitions include Locked & Loaded, Joshua Liner Gallery (2008); KNOW Show, Mark Murphy Design (Art Basel Miami Beach, 2007); F.A.M.E. Collective curated by Joshua Liner (Art Basel Miami Beach, 2007).

Artist
Greg Simkins

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