LONDON.- Simon Lee Gallery announces an exhibition of new paintings by Garth Weiser, his second exhibition with the gallery and his first solo exhibition in London.

Emergent images in Weiser’s abstract paintings flicker in and out of focus like analogue TV static. Ghosts of cartoon-like figures puncture the surfaces, shape-shifting as the eye is teased through dense layers of dots and drips, scumbles and scrapes, peaks and troughs.

Over the last six years, Weiser has been focused on a slow excavation of form and content through a process akin to the erosion of sedimentation. His paintings are built from layering unseen paintings, each representing a different history in terms of content, forms and materiality. The textured surface is then mined at the end of this long process to reveal a dynamic, fossilised slab.

The resultant vascular surfaces of the paintings trigger chromatic vibrations and optical illusions. Multiple perspectives and after-images emerge and recede with tributaries feeding and looping back into one another. The paintings are battle-scarred and, like cave-drawings, show the beginnings of a new language. Simultaneously ancient and futuristic, organic forms loom and twist, complicating the foreground and compromising figurative associations. As Weiser’s pull & push drama is played out on the canvas, fictional worlds are driven to the surface forcing a dynamic engagement with the viewer.

Weiser’s process is an investment in labour, time and production, in looking and re-evaluating. These paintings acknowledge how we live simultaneously in a world with absences and presences, through haunting evocations of the simulated and the real.

Garth Weiser was born in Helena, MT in 1979 and lives and works in Brooklyn and Hillsdale, NY. Weiser was recently the subject of solo exhibitions at Simon Lee Gallery, Hong Kong (2016); Casey Kaplan, New York, NY (2015); Altman Siegel, San Francisco, CA (2014); and White Flag Projects, St. Louis, MO (2010). His work has been included in numerous group exhibitions, including The Campaign for Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA (2016); Surface Tension, The Flag Art Foundation, New York, NY (2015); Pattern: Follow the Rules, Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum at Michigan State University, MI (2013); Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY (2012); Nothing Beside Remains, Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), Marfa, TX (2011); Seeing is a Kind of Thinking: A Jim Nutt Companion, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago, IL (2011); and Big New Field: Artists in the Cowboys Stadium Art Program, Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX (2010). Weiser’s work is additionally held in the collections of prominent institutions, including San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA; Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX; The Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, CA; The Whitworth, University of Manchester, Manchester, UK; Eli and Edythe Broad Art Museum: Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL.