By Jennifer Glickel
DNAinfo Reporter/Producer
CHELSEA — Imagine a map of the London Underground where instead of stopping at stations like Hyde Park Corner, Piccadilly Circus, and Bond Street, you'd stop at 'Aristotle,' 'Dick Cheney,' and 'Audrey Hepburn.'
Or a periodic table in which the 103 boxes are not filled with words like hydrogen, lithium, boron, and potassium, but the names of stars and constellations, such as 'Hydri,' 'Librae,' 'Betelgeuse,' and 'Procyon.'
Both of these can be seen at Chelsea's Benrimon Contemporary, where a retrospective of conceptual artist Simon Patterson opens Saturday.
Patterson has made it his life work to subtly disrupt systems of classification — like the Tube map and the the elements table — that are normally instantly recognizable for viewers.
The art aims to subvert the assumptions we live by, offering alternative — and sometimes humorous — interpretations of the seemingly familiar.
"Simon uses text and imagery to challenge the viewer and he really tries to make the viewer think, which is the point of art, but I think he does that very skillfully," said Leon Benrimon, the gallery's director.
"I think he really leaves the viewer thinking about his work for days, weeks, even months afterward."
In Patterson's signature piece from 1992, The Great Bear, the artist takes the familiar image of the London Underground map — which, upon first glance, is all the piece looks to be — but replaces each of the stops with names of philosophers, sports figures, planets, polticians, celebrities, and saints. Ultimately, the map isn’t about London.
The artist plays with names in his 'Name Paintings' series, which includes Richard Burton/Elizabeth Taylor from 1987 in which Patterson silk-screens each of their names in black typewriter font on a white background. When the viewer looks at the work, the names immediately evoke in the viewers' minds their own personal associations and images with the celebrities.
Newer works, like Patterson's Landskip, is a series of images the artist captured between 2000 and 2008 after setting off colored smoke grenades in public spaces, such as parks. Simultaneously a tribute and critique of traditional landscape paintings, the photographs capture the vibrant explosions of color in unconventional settings.
"What I love about Simon is that he's multidisciplinary," Benrimon told DNAinfo.
"He uses all kinds of mediums from works on paper to painting and photography to focus on questions of history, language, words, and the classification of objects in a really subversive way."
"Simon Patterson: Anthology" opens on Nov. 6 at Benrimon Gallery and runs through Dec. 18. The gallery is located at 514 West 24th Street between 10th and 11th Avenues.
