Jeffrey Simmons

Warm Fusion

May 16 - June 29, 2024

Opening Reception: “First Thursday,” June 6, 6-8pm
Artist talk: “Saturday After”, June 8 at noon

Greg Kucera Gallery is pleased to announce our tenth one-person exhibition, titled Warm Fusion, by Seattle artist Jeffrey Simmons. The artist’s current paintings continue to explore symmetrical, patterned abstractions through a variety of techniques. Employing brayers, spackling knives, squeegees, and stencils, Simmons creates compositions from layers of thin, transparent pigment or crudely ground particles of iron oxide suspended in acrylic medium.

“I apply elements of decorative patterning—derived from ink blots, textiles, stained glass, mosaic, wrought iron, and turned wood—towards formal and expressive ends. The descriptor "decorative" has historically been a pejorative in art criticism, particularly when applied to "serious" abstraction; yet classical abstract painting always shared meaningful elements with crafts that embrace the term more willingly, these elements being shallow pictorial space, non-hierarchical composition, and a predilection towards repetition, among other things. Various historical subsets of abstraction, including 1970s Pattern and Decoration, explored this overlap.

“An indirect, and deliberately imprecise, paint application technique allows for accident and variation within the rigid structure of each pattern. Throughout the process of making this exhibition, a guiding principle was "welcome mishap.” Voids, blobs, and misaligned colors all serve to activate and enliven the surface of these works.”

–Jeffrey Simmons

Work in exhibition