Gary Simmons is an American artist that represents the icons and stereotypes of the American popular culture. Interested in the medium's ambiguous and impermanent nature, his signature “erasure” technique is a process in which the artist partially obscures elements of his drawings and paintings, leaving behind disintegrated traces of his subject.

Born in 1964, in New York, the American artist depicts icons and stereotypes of the American popular culture. Simmons attracted a lot of attention in the 90s with his “erasure drawings,” using chalkboards found in an abandoned school as canvases, Simmons tends to probe with his artworks the misconceptions of class and racial identity. He graduated from the California Institute of the Arts and back to Manhattan he opened a vocational school. Interested in the medium's ambiguous and impermanent nature, his signature “erasure” technique is a process in which the artist partially obscures elements of his drawings and paintings, leaving behind disintegrated traces of his subject. In recent years, he has adapted the process to canvas using pigment, oil paint and cold wax. His inspiration comes mainly from American films, architecture and culture. His work has been acquired by major public art institutions, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art, Museum of Modern Art, The Studio Museum of Harlem, and the Whitney Museum of Art.

Gary Simmons

Gary Simmons references film, architecture, and American popular culture in paintings and drawings that address race, class, and memory on both personal and collective levels.

This is a representative bicolor work, the red of the metal plate in contrast to white chalk. He refers once again to American icons, in this case, one of the best known, the letters of Hollywood. Using his technical feature of “erasure drawings” creates an apocalyptic landscape giving sensation of a lonely atmosphere, the letters have a ghostly appearance even as they're burning. It is a work that perfectly defines both the pictorial style as thematic of the artist.

Simmons’ dramatically monochromatic Hollywood signs on fire has a sort of animation in itself, with its wisps of ethereal smoke, which underscores the instability and vulnerability of West cultural foundation. Part of the "Smoke" series, which took its inspiration from the film Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, this print communicates the artist´s impossible mission of ridding stereotypes in society, as "erasure" represents evidence that the viewer almost never sees.

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“ I am concerned with figuring absence, with negotiating between the static vocabulary of race, gender, and class stereotype and the invisibility of the dimension of human history in the objects i create. „

—Gary Simmons