24 June - 23 July 2000
Simon Linke is responsible for some of the most brilliantly iconic and recognisable work of the last twenty years. He started to make paintings in 1986 of the Ed Ruscha designed advertisement pages of Artforum, and as a result, tuned into a sensibility-in-the-making so of its time it was vertiginous. Here was work that not only supplied the answers and the questions, but the witty, astute asides, also. Linke's work had the best of both worlds, on the one hand he produced paintings that acted as interrogations into the contextual, critical and hierarchical structures of the art world, and at the same time, he made incredibly beautiful, painterly commodities. They were something like the sensual and indulgent 'other' to Art and Language, and other abstemious 70's conceptualism. Akin to Richard Prince's joke paintings, but with a chic makeover. Historically, Linke's work will be judged the nexus of 80's painting and 90's neoconeptualism - England with America. For those who looked further there were the undercurrencies of meaning, history and memory.
For his new exhibition, after an absence and a tangential period, Linke is back on salient territory. Combined with the continuing motifs, and new more loosely rendered compositions, Linke is back to doing what he does best, making sublimely intelligent, acutely executed paintings. Cloyed with acrylic, rather than oil paint, and resonating in an art discourse that beats to a different pulse, Linke has produced incipient work that flourishes both with and without its trenchant genealogy.
