Simone Montemurno

Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA

Artist statement

In my practice, I use traditional materials like painting and bookmaking in concert with new media like sound to exhibition design. Combining disparate formats allows me to create work that takes cues from artifacts that one might encounter in regional folk art museums, personal collections, and obscure archives. I rely on directed research, found source material, and my own lived experience to guide my research, making space for vernacular materials that are habitually neglected by dominant historical narrative. I apply conceptual strategies to painting, an inherently material and formal discipline. I employ the tactics and aesthetics of autodidacts, outsider artists, and other intractable subcultures. My work, like folk music, speaks to collective experience while remaining firmly anchored to an individual’s voice. I have a reverence for vernacular material, the detritus of culture. I mine discarded ephemera because it spotlights the specific and persistent evidence of lived experience. My work casts a historical web, developing artworks that compel viewers to interrogate both their own perceptions of cultural hierarchy and the legitimacy of institutions that canonize certain objects and movements to the detriment of others. My most recent painting series, ”After Kolar” is my direct response to 150 watercolor landscapes—painted by unrecognized artist F.Kolar which I found at a flea market in Prague. Kolar’s career spans from 1922-1957, a period that includes Hitler’s...

Artwork