Simon Linke is possibly the one individual extra fascinated with the longevity of this e-newsletter than its editors. For just about 4 many years, Linke has curious about a unmarried matter: the shiny ads for upcoming exhibitions that seem in Artforum’s per month print version. His painstakingly correct reproductions catapulted him to status as a number one member of the YBA era. On the other hand, Linke’s singular focal point belies the nuanced adjustments his Artforum challenge has passed through over the last thirty-five years.
The artist’s present exhibition at Darren Flook, a two-room retrospective of Linke’s biggest hits, unearths a gradual transition from precise replicas of the leaflets to extra materially targeted interpretations. Previous works, like Barbara Kruger at Fischbach Gallery, 1989, mimic the orderly association of print commercials with flat, even brushstrokes that create a near-perfect imitation of the unique. Redolent of Photos-generation artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine, Linke’s early works evoke the cultural and fiscal price of print ads. Through replicating those photographs as art work, he renders visual the finance-based energy buildings that underpin artwork grievance.
Lately, Linke has taken a extra gestural method, making use of thick layers of oil paint with dramatic brushstrokes. In Lucio Fontana at Hauser and Wirth, 2021, Linke abstracts {a photograph} of Fontana’s Ambiente spaziale con neon, 1967, providing a painterly interpretation of the gallery’s commercially pushed exhibition {photograph}. Whilst Linke has moved towards a extra impressionistic rendering of the advertisingments’ photographs, he has endured to meticulously reproduction the textual content with mechanical precision. In those later works, the limits between the graceful traces of the letters and the tough waves of paint turn out to be extra abrupt. It’s a becoming metaphor for Linke’s focal point, which has advanced from a want to show the commercial helps that buttress probably the most artwork global’s biggest publications to an investigation into the (intended) obsolescence of print media. Those new art work foreground the tactility of the published web page, a reminder of our distance from this ageing method of distribution and the hierarchies it as soon as embodied.
