GARY SIMMONS: THIN ICE

Hauser & Wirth New York is pleased to present “Thin Ice”, Gary Simmons’ first solo presentation with the gallery.

November 2, 2024 – January 11, 2025

Simmons’ art skates deftly between abstraction and representation via his signature technique of erasure. This formal conceit upends the viewer’s sense of certainty; by degrading familiar icons, he exposes latent meanings and ugly truths lurking just behind the surface of popular imagery. For example, Simmons has consistently used Bosko and Honey, a pair of racist cartoon characters first created in 1928, as avatars of institutionalized racism.

Bosko reappears in ‘Thin Ice’ but with a new and unmistakable urgency. The exhibition opens with a painting that depicts him as a fiddle player frenetically sawing away at his strings. This work signals the start of a performance that will unfold across several successive canvases in which Bosko glides on ice skates to execute a single disjointed pirouette. Together the works achieve the effect of a stop motion film or comic strip. Simmons has blurred the contour lines of Bosko’s whirling figure, an expressive tactic that induces a vicarious sense of dizziness in the viewer.

‘Thin Ice’ also unveils a new sculpture replete with its own unique set of conceptual and physical paradoxes. Constructed from steel, foam and polyurethane, and finished with automotive paint, ‘Black Frosty’ (2024) resembles a snowman cast in obsidian or coal, his neck ensnared by a 20-foot-long, hand-knit noose made of white wool, suggesting an underlying violence often masked by civility.

An adjacent large-scale painting depicts a constellation of black stars streaming across a hazy blue and white sky, mirroring the inverted color palette of Simmons’ snowman. Here, the heavens are punctuated by points projecting the absence of light and ‘Black Frosty’ remains frozen in time, forever on the verge of dissolution.