Simon Linke at Darren Flook
Simon Linke is probably the one individual extra involved with the longevity of this publication than its editors. For practically 4 a long time, Linke has centered on a single topic: the shiny commercials for upcoming exhibitions that seem in Artforum’s month-to-month print version. His painstakingly correct reproductions catapulted him to fame as a number one member of the YBA technology. Nevertheless, Linke’s singular focus belies the nuanced adjustments his Artforum challenge has undergone over the previous thirty-five years.
The artist’s present exhibition at Darren Flook, a two-room retrospective of Linke’s best hits, reveals a gradual transition from actual replicas of the leaflets to extra materially centered interpretations. Earlier works, like Barbara Kruger at Fischbach Gallery, 1989, mimic the orderly association of print advertisements with flat, even brushstrokes that create a near-perfect imitation of the unique. Redolent of Footage-generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, Linke’s early works evoke the cultural and financial worth of print commercials. By replicating these photographs as work, he renders seen the finance-based energy buildings that underpin artwork criticism.
In recent times, Linke has taken a extra gestural method, making use of thick layers of oil paint with dramatic brushstrokes. In Lucio Fontana at Hauser and Wirth, 2021, Linke abstracts {a photograph} of Fontana’s Ambiente spaziale con neon, 1967, providing a painterly interpretation of the gallery’s commercially pushed exhibition {photograph}. At the same time as Linke has moved towards a extra impressionistic rendering of the advertisingments’ photographs, he has continued to meticulously duplicate the textual content with mechanical precision. In these later works, the boundaries between the sleek strains of the letters and the tough waves of paint develop into extra abrupt. It’s a becoming metaphor for Linke’s focus, which has advanced from a need to disclose the financial helps that buttress one of many artwork world’s largest publications to an investigation into the (supposed) obsolescence of print media. These new work foreground the tactility of the printed web page, a reminder of our distance from this ageing technique of distribution and the hierarchies it as soon as embodied.
— Jonah Goldman Kay
