Future Dream

FUTURE DREAM a solo exhibition of works by Finnish sculptor Kim Simonsson, opens online May 28th.

Simonsson is a sculptor with a focused vision best known for his ongoing series, The Moss Children, whose uncanny auras inspire, at one, awe and trepidation.

Simonsson sculpts with a great sensitivity for his subjects. All of his work is thematically linked in that it builds on the human figure, gesture, and the notion of the uncanny. His current works are invigorating, imaginative variations on the themes of civilizational collapse, distance, searching, and obscurity. They provide a space for an ongoing meditation on social, cultural, and civilizational connections.

As a whole the work forms a narrative that expands, shifts, and travels as the sculptures do. The Moss Children are as at-home in a forest as they are in a museum— their auras extend into the spaces around them, yet the figures themselves appear untouched, remaining aloof from the constraints of time or civilizational constructs swirling around them.

He initially stumbled upon sculpture while playing in snow as a child, and at the start of his career his work veered heavily into pop— creamy white glazed figures topped off with glass orbs and accented with shining metallic lusters. Simonsson is developing his artistic practice by returning to his own earlier notions, which he reanimates with an eye for the Now.  Thus, our half feral children of the forest are joined by dandies and phantoms; feathers add both meaning and mystery to the work while golden glaze adds decadent drip. 

The figures glazed in bronze are of particular interest because of the unavoidable comparison it is possible to make between them and the bronze sculptures of antiquity which haunt our cultural psyche. What gleams like a Roman reproduction of a Greek original, cast in bronze? A Simonsson, perhaps— the pieces have as much presence and none of the pretension.

All the while, the departure from the initial narrative of the Moss Children’s alienation from the human social sphere is never total. Rather it works as a pervasive thread within Simonsson’s work which proposes a steadfast vision of the future which does not lack hope.

Gazing at the strange figures and visual tale of intrigue woven around them we nearly ask, what moves them? They in turn ask, what moves us?

Click here to download the exhibition catalogue.