For their guest appearance at Rental Gallery in Los Angeles, Ritter/Zamet, London are pleased to present the first solo exhibition in the United States of British artist, Simon Bedwell.
Since the demise of the infamous guerilla-artist collective BANK in 2003, Simon Bedwell has established himself as a renowned solo-artist. He was short-listed for the esteemed Beck’s Futures Art Prize 2004 at London’s ICA and his work has since been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery (Galleon and Other Stories, 2004), Laden Für Nichts, Leipzig (England Their England, 2005), and at White Columns, New York (Post No Bills, 2005). He had his first solo exhibition at Ritter/Zamet in April/May 2005 and is currently showing his latest project, GENTS: A Melodrama in 2 Acts at Platform in London. Upcoming shows will include The Triumph of Painting Part 6 at the Saatchi Gallery and a solo exhibition at White Columns, New York later on next year.
Simon Bedwell is best known for his hand-manipulated trashed posters and photographs, using text and spray-paint to generate esoteric, strangely poignant or crass comedic fusions of word and image. The work draws on the visual vernacular of the streets, employing the cheap and throwaway nostalgia of posters scavenged from billboards, bargain bins and thrift stores as raw materials to fragment, divert and elaborate the original meaning into absurd compositions, poetic narratives and sardonic allegories of power.
Some of the posters have had their transient commercial directives so intertwined with the artist's fictional and material alterations that it is impossible to tell where the original ends and the mutation begins. But whilst destroying the quick-hit, constantly shifting message of this ephemeral material, Bedwell also saves it, giving it new weight and an object-quality that meanwhile retains an echo of the familiar, like a nagging memory difficult to place.
Since the demise of the infamous guerilla-artist collective BANK in 2003, Simon Bedwell has established himself as a renowned solo-artist. He was short-listed for the esteemed Beck’s Futures Art Prize 2004 at London’s ICA and his work has since been exhibited at the Saatchi Gallery (Galleon and Other Stories, 2004), Laden Für Nichts, Leipzig (England Their England, 2005), and at White Columns, New York (Post No Bills, 2005). He had his first solo exhibition at Ritter/Zamet in April/May 2005 and is currently showing his latest project, GENTS: A Melodrama in 2 Acts at Platform in London. Upcoming shows will include The Triumph of Painting Part 6 at the Saatchi Gallery and a solo exhibition at White Columns, New York later on next year.
Simon Bedwell is best known for his hand-manipulated trashed posters and photographs, using text and spray-paint to generate esoteric, strangely poignant or crass comedic fusions of word and image. The work draws on the visual vernacular of the streets, employing the cheap and throwaway nostalgia of posters scavenged from billboards, bargain bins and thrift stores as raw materials to fragment, divert and elaborate the original meaning into absurd compositions, poetic narratives and sardonic allegories of power.
Some of the posters have had their transient commercial directives so intertwined with the artist's fictional and material alterations that it is impossible to tell where the original ends and the mutation begins. But whilst destroying the quick-hit, constantly shifting message of this ephemeral material, Bedwell also saves it, giving it new weight and an object-quality that meanwhile retains an echo of the familiar, like a nagging memory difficult to place.