Flowers Gallery is pleased to announce the 24th edition of Artist of the Day, a vital West End exhibition programme selected by leading contemporary artists since 1983. The fast-paced, revolving two week exhibition schedule provides a platform for a selected group of artists, each presenting a one day solo exhibition at Flowers Gallery’s Mayfair location, with a programme of events taking place each day.

DAY ONE: Simon Popper selected by Rut Blees Luxemburg. A one day exhibition will be held from 11am - 7pm at Flowers Gallery, Cork Street, London.

Refreshments will be served in the gallery 12-2pm. Please contact rsvp@flowersgallery.com to confirm your attendance.

Simon Popper’s work can be broadly understood by its degrees of visual and linguistic separation, that is, through its titles (its naming) and the relations between what the works appear to be, what they are and what they might become. This often rests upon a hinge of wordplay or punning and visual tropes to break down or collapse objects and ideas characterised by a sense of the comedic or the deadpan – but in all seriousness – in a logic of displacement or derangement.

The permeation of a kind of working dyslexia (real and imagined) or visual/linguistic displacement extends to Popper’s methodology in general and to each operation in particular. It’s his way of creating or making things in the world and for the world and his reason for doing it in the first place. This displacement or making other of art, books or just things is as much about the pleasure of creating opportunities as it is about unmaking them, a kind of non-productivity or ‘patience work’ in its ‘purposelessness’ in the folly of its ways. It could be understood as a ‘negative’ making or anti-artisanal production by producing something not just along the lines of value or even the commodity – at least notionally. It’s almost as if the artist was a cottage industry but without the industry, production without product in the simple act of doing.

The work of Simon Popper is an invitation to delinquency, an abandonment of one’s place anchoring a rational centred self into some altogether other self in another place, ordered and classified by systematic play and caprice if only for a moment. The ideal space these works might inhabit would be something like a contemporary ‘room of one’s own’, that now impossibly dissolving bourgeois space, away from the order of things, from the exhaustion of life and from a life surrounded by exhausted objects.

- David Bussel 

"I chose Simon Popper, as I am long-time devotee of his work: his witty drawings, joyous sculptures and exuberant paintings, often linked via a humble object such as the earthy and multitudinous mushroom - a recurrent motive - captured in a delicate typology, ongoing and hallucinogenic. His recent book focusses on the potato, another continuously shape-shifting earth-work. A one-day exhibition is an event, that in its temporal compression asks for a shift in the way an artwork is exhibited and transmitted. Will diaphanous elephants dangle from the ceiling?  Might incandescent objects move beyond the gallery? And can the making of art continue to be a form of productive subversion?"

- Rut Blees Luxemburg