Residue, Traces, Ghosts

For ‘Remembering Tomorrow,’ his first exhibition with Hauser & Wirth, in Los Angeles, Simmons speaks about growing up a latch-key child, nurtured by afternoon television cartoon shows, learning early on the degree to which American popular culture and structural racism are inextricably intertwined. In painting, drawing and sculpture over three decades, his work has often stood as an anguished poetic struggle against the contradictions of the culture in which he was raised. ‘There’s no way to actually erase a stereotype,’ he says. ‘It’s always going to have some traces left behind … that fever violence to get rid of it is a futile experience, because you can’t get rid of it.’