Laurie Simmons The Long House

For the first time in Spain the gallery Distrito Cu4tro is showing the work of Laurie Simmons (New York, 1949) presenting a selection from her recent pieces The Long House and The Instant Decorator.

Among contemporary American artists Simmons is a creative pioneer of dramatised figurative photography. She describes and comments provocatively on contemporary culture, recreating something of the fifties, a sense of the 50s that I knew was both beautiful and lethal, using dolls to act out various scenarios. Her way of using narrative links her with many contemporary fiction writers, while her love of artifice, advertising and childhood recollections, her eclectic tenacity, these all link her to the raging debate about the reality of photography which has been going on for the last thirty years.

Simmons is at her most original and creative in her new way of working in the artistic/photographic world. She completely transforms modes of representation with her photographic collages, introducing these smooth surfaces which give to the pictures something original, strange and disturbing.

Housewives, dancers, cowboys, tourists and 'ventriloquists’ dummies, all in saturated colour, fill her large pictures, which are imbued with a sense of bittersweet nostalgia, a disorienting feeling of mystery. She does not deal in visual magic realism, however: she is always moving towards a precise perspective, transforming the scale of what she portrays and creating new settings which are never less than dramatic.

In the last decades of the twentieth century, Laurie Simmons played an important role in the feminist critique of the image. Her creativity is immense. Since the seventies she has produced 14 series, in which presences and absences combine, transforming the female role into a personal world. You could say that with the use of her own image she herself becomes her own muse.

Simmons, who lives and works in Manhattan, exhibits regularly in the US and in Europe. Her work is in the most prestigious public and private collections, notably MOMA in NY, the Contemporary Art Museum in Los Angeles, Hara in Tokio, the Stedelijk in Amsterdam, the Whitney Museum in NY and the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis.

Pressetext

Laurie Simmons "The Long House"