SIMON EVANS

SIMON EVANS: Edible Landscape

February 13—March 22, 2014

Opening Reception: February 13, 2014, 6-8PM

James Cohan Gallery is pleased to present the gallery’s third solo exhibition by Brooklyn-based British artist Simon Evans, Edible Landscape, on view February 13 through March 22, 2014. The exhibition coincides with the release of the first major monograph on the artist, published by Kerber Verlag and featuring texts by Elodie Evers, Jacob Fabricius, Jens Hoffmann, Anders Kold, Will Self and Dana Ward.

Simon Evans has become internationally known over the past decade for highly-detailed, text-based works that transform prosaic materials into objects of concrete poetry. Integral to Evans’ artistic practice is his collaboration with his wife and creative partner, Sarah Lannan. Past works have taken the form of maps, lists, diagrams and sculpture. In the words of Louisiana Museum of Modern Art curator, Anders Kold, Evans “is concerned with the absurd and inadequate measures of truthfulness. Evans’ truth situates the viewer between intergalactic configurations, infrastructural carriageways, mental topography and mere everyday observations, insisting on the world in its entirety and as something belonging to us all.”

Edible Landscape marks a further exploration for the artist with the debut of four large abstract works. Collaging ephemera collected from New York City sidewalks with Evans’ own notes, the abstractions resemble dense, gestural almost-landscapes. Their expansive accumulation parallels the omnipresent digital cloud, archiving the trace elements of human experience to map a collective consciousness.

Simon Evans’ poetics merge the everyday with the extraordinary. For a year, he carried around death in his pocket recording a list of R.I.P.s, while a woven paper maze defines life as a perpetual state of Inbetweens. As curator Jens Hoffman suggests, “Evans’ willingness to expose interior, often neurotic thoughts makes his work feel honest. But the thing that makes it broadly relatable is the part left unsaid. The details he provides become poignant when viewers supply the substance in between: a whole, imagined world based on a concise premise.”

Simon Evans and Sarah Lannan live and work in Brooklyn, NY.  Evans’ solo exhibition, Only Words Eaten by Experience, is on view at MoCA Cleveland, OH through February 16, 2014.  Past solo exhibitions include 2013, First You Make the Rules, Then You Break the Rules with Öyvind Fahlström, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Germany and Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen, Denmark; 2012, How to Be Alone When You Live With Someone, Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg; 2005, How to get about, Aspen Art Museum, CO; and The Bulletin Board, White Columns, New York, NY. Evans has also been featured in the 12th International Istanbul Biennial, Turkey in 2011; the 27th São Paulo Biennial in 2006, Brazil; and the 2004 California Biennial at The Orange County Museum in Newport Beach, CA. 

Evans’ work is included in many prominent collections, including the Aspen Art Museum, CO; Cisneros Fontanals Art Foundation (CIFO), Miami; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark; Miami Art Museum, FL; Musée d'Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean (MUDAM), Luxembourg; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA. 

The Simon Evans monograph will be available at the gallery and distributed through D.A.P. To order a copy, please visit www.jamescohan.com/books.  To read more on the artist, please visit Simon Evans. For press inquiries, please contact Jane Cohan at jane@jamescohan.com.