Simon Birch: The Inevitable

The Inevitable is the new exhibition of the English artist Simon Birch at the Ben Brown Fine Arts, Hong Kong.

Birch is celebrated for his gestural, thickly-impastoed portraits teeming with the angst and energy of his sitters. These technically precise paintings capture the dynamism of his models through broad, overlapping planes of color pulled across the canvas. Birch successfully conveys this intensity of motion in The sky was aquamarine, stroked with clouds. She could smell the grass and taste the scent of small, crushed flowers, 2015, the staggering figure seemingly shielding herself in a vortex of color and movement, her body parts becoming fractured, geometric fields of colour.

Simon Birch (b. 1974, Brighton) currently lives and works Hong Kong. He has had solo shows in Beijing, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Miami, and Singapore, as well as exhibiting in group shows at the Hong Kong Museum of Art, the Haunch of Venison, London, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo. Working with oil on canvas, Birch has also ventured into film and installation work culminating in some particularly notable large-scale projects, including the 20,000 square feet multimedia installations HOPE & GLORY: A Conceptual Circus (2010) and Daydreaming With…The Hong Kong Edition (2012) at the ArtisTree, TaiKoo Place, Hong Kong. These large multimedia projects integrated paintings with film, installation, sculpture, and performance housed in specifically configured spaces.