Simon Ogden
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'private investigations' 800 x 800 mm , mixed media on canvas including 24 K gold leaf and copper leaf
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Biography
I was a student during the late 1970s and early 1980s, graduating initially from Birmingham Polytechnic with a BFA in Sculpture and then four years later from the Royal College of Art with a Masters in Painting.
My work draws from a long-held interest in European and American Modernism and Surrealism. In this I interweave my allegiance to the Arts and Crafts tradition, and the long-standing debate about the definition and role of the decorative in the fine arts. Combined together, these forces open the door to a varied dialogue which contains figuration of and symbolic references to the landscape and the body as well as the transformation of materials and the extension of functions.
My studio work moves across painting, object-making, design, printmaking, photography and drawing. Each of these areas of creative activity reinforces and extends the possibilities of my continuing artistic practice. I have always been an avid collector of materials and an obsessive viewer of environments, surfaces, histories and forms. Travel has always been a significant trigger to the expansion of my visual world.
Most of my work is reliant on the gathering of found objects and forms that can suggest a beginning. During the last 15 years I have been building pictures with a variety of materials, for example, by inlaying plywood into plywood, linoleum into linoleum, by pasting canvas onto canvas and building objects out of found materials and forms of all sorts. My work always involves references to the history that these materials had prior to their reprocessing.
See Simon’s Lockdown Interview here -
About this work
“Private investigations “
When you are in a jungle of towering trees dense undergrowth and no horizon there is always a sense that you are being observed by someone or some thing. Surveillance.
The montaged eyes and face in the work are segments from images taken in the extraordinary folk museum in Santa Fe. The smoke rising from the caldron is an edited portion of a the repair made on the interior concrete wall of an abandoned workers house built by Mussolini in the hills in south east Sicily.
