Simon Ingram

b. 1971, Wellington, New Zealand
Lives in Auckland

Simon Ingram has engaged in a decades-long examination of painting and technology. At the heart of his practice is an interest in human responses to new technologies. To Ingram, painting is a way to explore those encounters. His work connects to a recurrent theme in painting since the invention of the camera. From the ‘blank flash of the magnesium flare’ of Edouard Manet’s Olympia, to the telephone paintings of Laszlo Maholy-Nagy, or the factory-like production conditions of Warhol’s silkscreens, painters have found various ways to incorporate emergent technologies into their work.

Ingram’s interest in the idea of machines and systems as a means to explore painting has moved through several iterations. He has created paintings using custom machine assemblages that translate data, interpreting signals from a wide range of sources including cosmic radiation and brain waves to generate paintings. He has also used machine learning tools to generate imagery. This exploration has seen him experiment with other disciplines including computer science and radio astronomy, and he notes that his works can be seen as science experiments as well as artworks.

Ingram’s most recent exhibition with Gow Langsford is Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension. In this body of work, Ingram engaged with machine learning responses to the title of a work created by Kazimir Malevich - Black Square and Red Square also known as Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack – Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension (1915). Ingram repeatedly used the phrase “Malevich, Painterly Realism of a Boy with a Knapsack - Colour Masses in the Fourth Dimension” to prompt an open-source machine learning tool. This created inputs for the generation of this series of painted compositions.

This project relates to the artist’s broad intention to make invisible energy or ideas visible. His radio paintings from 2012 – 2017 translated radio waves or other electromagnetic energy into paintings. He has also used an off the shelf electroencephalogram (EEG) headset, custom software, and a machine to generate paintings from electric activity in the brain. His most recent work takes the concept of a machine as an assemblage or system, rather than a set of mechanical components. The common factors running through his work is the visual interpretation of data and the creation of informational fields in paint.

Ingram’s work has been exhibited in a wide range of contexts over the past two decades, including private galleries, public museums, and project spaces in Australasia, Europe, and the USA. Exhibition highlights include the curated project Minus Space at MOMA’s P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in Long Island City, New York and solo show Radio Painting Station: Looking for the Waterhole at ZKM in Karlsruhe, Germany in 2017. He holds a Doctorate from Elam School of Fine Arts, University of Auckland (2006) where he is now a Senior Lecturer. He has won notable awards, including the University of Auckland Best Doctoral Thesis Award (2007). His work is held in key national and international public and private collections including the collection of Auckland Art Gallery Toi o Tāmaki.

Simon Ingram has exhibited with Gow Langsford Gallery since 2008.

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Driven to Abstraction is a group show of contemporary artists who together represent a diverse range of entry points into abstraction.

Judy Millar’s paintings, based on gesture, lend themselves to elements of both Abstract Expressionism and Lyrical Abstraction. Millar plays on the notion of gesture in abstraction but adds an ironic twist to the discussion by using screen-printing techniques to generate the final image. Like Millar, Simon Ingram’s non-objective canvases signal more contemporary approaches in his innovative use of modern technologies combined with the hand drawn, in his painting practice. The slug-like painted forms in the two Untitled works appear to devour the formal geometric elements of the painting and one senses that with the passing of time these works will return to the pristine plain white surfaces that existed prior to Ingram making his marks.

Max Gimblett’s large diptych Either/Or from 1983 appears at first glance to be a classic piece of American minimalist painting. However the surface of the work is activated by Gimblett’s masterful use of heavy brushwork to create texture. In the centre of each square a rectangle painted in the same colour and manner as the rest of the painting subtly reveals itself to the viewer. Allen Maddox’s ardent and impassioned paintings established him as one for the most noted Abstract Expressionists New Zealand has produced. Colin McCahon’s Jump painting is indicative of the abstracted landscapes for which is well known.

Although not strictly abstract American Isaac Layman’s photographs offer an alternative perspective on everyday subjects, as the context of his subjects is shifted. By shifting scale and limiting colour creates formal abstract compositions. In Blackout Laymen photographs a blind in a window to produce a work that references the American painter Agnes Martin.

Through myriad approaches, media and materials Driven to Abstraction considers the visual language of abstraction.