Slightly smaller than one of Artforum's full-page ads, Simon Linke's paintings corrupt the clean graphic layout of their source through a full-on indulgence in an excess of oil paint. Replicating the ads as faithfully as possible while wrangling a robust, fluid material within an almost comically limiting surface area, Linke's paintings exist as a near-perfect contradiction between boldly expressed market confidence and an artist's potential alienation from the pressures to produce a consistent product.
Arresting Artforum's iconic monthly bulletins announcing the "new" in a relief of thickly applied paint, Linke's paintings express the ideal of stability where there is none, flipping the temporal nature of an exhibition notice on its head. Focusing largely on recognizable blue chip artists and galleries, the paintings' compact size and precise articulation offer an ironic contrast to the overwhelming scale and volume of the contemporary art market from which their subjects are derived.
More recently focusing on ads featuring paintings, which become paintings of ads, Linke channels his enthusiasm for the medium of paint through the discipline of a working within predetermined surface area, where the "natural" boundaries of his compositions reveal staging mechanisms of contemporary art that are often hidden in plain sight. When looked at as a decade’s long project, which functions as an informal archive, Simon Linke's work offers a refreshing sense of historicism often lost in the collective pressure to focus on the "next big thing".
