Simon Bill

About

The oval paintings of Simon Bill draw upon a very wide variety of sources, from philosophy to heavy metal, art history to cookery, Art Deco to neuroscience. Characterised mainly by their abrupt discontinuities of theme, style and medium from one work to the next, the size and shape are the only really consistent feature with these paintings. Bill's work is simultaneously smart and dumb ? it exhibits a goofy absurdity whilst fully respecting the importance of process, poetry, knowledge and reason. There is a kind of contemporary heraldry in the intermittent use of repeated motifs; for example Wittgenstein's ?duck/rabbit?, a cartoonish emblem of ambiguity and cognitive indeterminacy. This exhibition, titled Lucky Jim, includes more than 30 works of mixed vintage, from 1999 to the present.