In Residence: Gary Simmons

Hauser & Wirth Somerset is delighted to welcome Gary Simmons as our artist-in-residence in September 2026.

During his residency in Somerset, Simmons will be working on a series of new paintings and works on paper for his upcoming solo exhibition at Hauser & Wirth Hong Kong in January 2027.

One of the foremost artists of a generation which emerged during the late 1980s and early 1990s, Gary Simmons has achieved wide acclaim over the past three decades for his work which explores the politics of race, class and social stereotypes through painting, sculpture, sound and architectural environments. Simmons uses imagery drawn from popular culture to create works that address personal and collective memories.

Born in New York NY in 1964, Simmons received his BFA from the School of Visual Arts in 1988 and his MFA from CalArts in 1990, studying under the tutelage of Charles Gaines, Michael Asher, Catherine Lord and others. Early in his practice, Simmons established a studio in a former school in New York City. At this stage, he was working predominantly in sculpture, a medium he would return to in subsequent decades.

Simmons’ use of pedagogical motifs, in particular readymade chalkboards, led to the formal and aesthetic breakthrough that would inform much of his subsequent work, in which erasure of the image has been a powerful and recurring theme. Outlines of characters, scenes and words—based on 20th-century cartoons steeped in the racist traditions of minstrelsy, disappeared architectural sites, vintage film title cards, evaporating clouds of smoke and stars—are drawn or painted then blurred and smeared by hand. The tropes of erasure and ephemerality suggest the fleeting nature of memory and histories re-written.

Gary Simmons has been the subject of solo exhibitions globally, including: Cookie Factory, Denver CO; Henry Art Gallery, Seattle WA; California African American Museum, Los Angeles CA; Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, Forth Worth TX; and Kunsthaus Zürich, Switzerland. Selected group exhibitions include: Museum of Modern Art, New York NY; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis MN; and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands. Simmons was featured in Thelma Golden’s landmark 1994 ‘Black Male’ exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York NY; Franklin Sirmans’ 2014 Prospect Triennial in New Orleans LA; and Okwui Enwezor’s ‘All the World’s Futures,’ for the 2015 Venice Biennale, Italy. The first comprehensive institutional survey of Simmons’ work, ‘Gary Simmons: Public Enemy,’ was on view at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago IL in 2023 and traveled to Pérez Art Museum Miami FL from 2023 – 2024.

In Somerset, Simmons’ ‘Untitled (Crow 2)’ (2023) is on view in the farmyard outside Roth Bar as part of an outdoor sculpture presentation across the site.