Artists

Simon Denny Born in 1982 in Auckland, New Zealand |Lives and works in Berlin

Portrait

Simon Denny

Simon Denny
Foto: Derek Henderson

Simon Dennyhas a passion for the technological icons of the mass and pop cultures, for those about to disappear as well as the most current technological developments. As a “keen amateur reader and viewer” of the entertainment industry’s various media, its aesthetics, and the inflationary information economy underlying it, he uses its images and objects for his sculptural and installative examinations.

He often frees objects from their original context to place them together in new constellations. His sculptures are deliberately illustrative and elegant, and at the same time display their simple, fabricated nature.

Denny’s works monitor the changes in the display technology of media installations in which the heavy rectangular monitors and large projectors are increasingly disappearing as a manifest, physical part of many works and are being replaced by flat screens and quiet and barely perceptible beamers. With a modicum of nostalgia, he comments on the thinness and loss of depth that make up the aesthetic of these objects today.

The artist’s favorite subject matter is the television (and our watching of it). By using iPads, cell phones, and other display screens or also by compiling television programs lasting several hours and presenting them in art institutions as well as in (semi-) public spaces like hotel lobbies, waiting areas in district offices, and train stations, he has revealed television to be a multiple, fragmented, and contradictory medium, and by doing so prevents the easy identification with stereotyping strategies oscillating between educational fantasies and cultural-critical defamation.

Solo exhibitions (selection)

2012 Aspen Art Museum
Envisioning Vocational Rehabilitation, Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster
2011 Corporate Video Decisions, Petzel Gallery, New York
Cruise Line, NAK, Aachen
2010 Negative Headroom, Halle fĂĽr Kunst, LĂĽneburg
Introductory logic video tutorial, Artspace Sydney
2009 Deep Sea Vaudeo, Galerie Buchholz, Cologne
2008 Ursula Blickle Stiftung, Kraichtal

Group exhibition (selection)

2012 Remote Control, ICA, London
2011 So machen wir es, Kunsthaus Bregenz
Based in Berlin, KW, Berlin
2010 Verbotene Liebe, Kölnischer Kunstverein
Permanent Mimesis, GAM, Torino
Throwing Three Balls in the Air to Get a Straight Line, Malmö Konsthall
Let us compare Mythologies, Witte de With, Rotterdam
2008 Revolutions: Forms that Turn, Sydney Biennale 2008