Simon Frost Sold at Auction Prices

b. 1961 -

Simon Frost (° 1961) is a British artist living in New York since the late 1980’s. He has held exhibitions in Great-Britain and the United States. His work exclusively consists of drawings. Although his vocabulary is simple and largely abstract, drawn dots or lines, it usually takes the artist months to conclude one of his painstaking, labour intensive works.

For his first exhibition in Brussels, the artist is showing a series of drawings that date from the last four years, his entire output from that period. The drawings range in size between 13 x 13 cm and 188 x 97 cm.

“The urgency of Frost’s drawings is not in the production, but in the process. He draws slowly out of necessity. The gradual accumulation of small marks that lies at the core of his very straightforward method challenges viewers to rethink their relationship to time and the degree to which we actually look and experience art.”… Rendered on paper and vellum in graphite, gouache, watercolour and ink, the drawings by Frost represent intricate patterns of marks, dots, short lines or abstract signs. “In each drawing, Simon Frost makes the same mark countless times. And yet, no matter how strict the procedure, and no matter how often he inscribes an equivalent line or abstract sign, his repetitions never become dull or mechanical. In fact, just the opposite occurs. We find ourselves riveted by his minutely detailed surfaces, by drawings that appear to be on the brink of disappearing before our eyes. For in making drawings that are as intricate, delicate and structurally tight as a spider web, Frost’s virtuosity consists of making the same small mark or minute gesture fresh each time.”

Frost’s obsessively repeated marks initially seem to form clear, delimited patterns. But, even as they are constructed, they also immediately start to disintegrate. “For all of his devotion to repetition and order, Frost continually courts disruption, disorder, and absence. In doing so, he reminds us that being alive is to be vulnerable to interventions that are unexpected and devastating…”