Exhibitions Michael Simms Drive 22nd September 2020 - 10th October 2020

Please contact the gallery if you would like to request a preview for this exhibition.

Michael Simms' upcoming exhibition teases out the central question of what drives human behaviour. Using the figure to explore his interest in concepts of the unconscious and identity formation, alongside the artist's own queerness, Simms' works delve into taboos of human contact, disconnection and dream states. Frustrations with the limitations of corporal bodies, issues of narcissism and the creation of online personas in the increasingly hyper digital environment are also explored.

Freudian theories such as that of Eros and Thanatos - representing the innate drive for creativity, life and productivity existing in opposition to the innate impulse towards death and destruction - are embodied, alongside a deliberate use of repetition to articulate ideas of unconscious drive enacted within our contemporary lives, as well as within humanities compulsion to repeat similar patterns of behaviour.

Simms has been a finalist in the Shirley Hannan Portrait Prize (2020), the Percival Portrait Prize (2020), the Kennedy Art Award (2019), the Eutick Memorial Still Life Award (2019), the Lethbridge Art Award (2019), the Percival Tucker Portrait Prize (2018) and winner of both the Young Artist Prize through the Art Society of NSW (2018), and of the SBS Portrait Prize (2018). In 2017 he was a finalist in the prestigious Doug Moran Portrait Prize, the Mosman Art Prize and the Fisher’s Ghost Art Prize among others. Simms first exhibited with FLG as part of our Exploration exhibition series in 2017. His work is in numerous private collections including the Elliott Eyes Collection, the Thomas Keneally Centre at the Sydney Mechanics' School of Arts, Cliftons Venues, Sydney, YSC Consulting Sydney.

MICHAEL SIMMS PROFILE
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Michael Simms
Artwork in Progress in studio 2020

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