about Kirsten Sims
Kirsten Sims (b. 1987) is a visual artist based in Cape Town, South Africa. She works predominantly as a painter and illustrator. Kirsten completed a BA in Applied Design at the Stellenbosch Academy (2011) and completed her Honours degree in Illustration at Stellenbosch University (2014). Kirsten’s philosophy in life and art is “one thing leads to another”. Her own path has led to editorial and commercial illustration projects for the likes of The New Yorker, Airbnb, AD Magazine and Apartamento Magazine; solo exhibitions in Cape Town and Toronto; and inclusions in numerous art fairs and group exhibitions. The narrative quality of Kirsten’s work has also lent itself naturally to children’s storybook illustration. Orfeu Negro published her first picture book, Balthazar The Great, in 2015.
Through her painting Kirsten seeks connection; to communicate the way she sees and experiences the world and her place in it. The scenes Kirsten paints are often a self-aware and gentle parody of the lives people portray on social media. Taking a break from the hyper-connectedness of modern living, within a body of work Kirsten will swop the sartorial crowd for big open skies punctuated with an evening star or rolling clouds. She seamlessly replaces the theatre of human interaction with the drama of a natural landscape.
currently on view:
’AWAY’
september 12 - november 2, 2024
we are thrilled to be launching this collection of 15 paintings on canvas, 'AWAY' inspired by Kirsten’s recent travels to Greece.
read + watch more about the collection below.
email gallery@alisonmilne.com will any questions
KIRSTEN SIMS | AWAY (on view Sept 12 - Nov 2)
written by Lee Helme.
In the Aegean, transience is normal. Islands appear and disappear in the heat; theedges of things – land, buildings, thoughts – feel tremulous in the dazzling light.– Jennifer Higgie
AWAY continues the exploration of an integral theme within Sims’s oeuvre: place, in all its geographical and psychosocial dimensions. But in this new body of work, there is an emphasis on the tensions that arise between presence and absence in relation to place – ”away” speaks simultaneously of the freedom of escape and of devastating distance.
Inspired by a 2023 trip to the Greek Isles – and the conflicting experiences of idyllic retreat and longing for home – these paintings are not simply renditions of picture-postcard vistas. Rather, the artworks serve as collages of a sort. Sims combines fragments of multiple references to create landscapes that map out both outer and inner worlds, drawing on sources both concrete and intangible, ranging from personal holiday photographs and anonymous portraits unearthed in second-hand shops, to artworks from past exhibitions, made-up memories and actual accounts. Ina series of painterly urges and impulses that vary from accidental to more controlled, these fugitive fragments mingle together in juxtapositions that reflect the bittersweet, multi-coloured and heightened emotions embodied in going and being away.
The sense of “away”, of distance, is further suggested in temporal terms. A 12-month space between the then of the concrete event and the now of portrayal offers fertile ground for the play of memory and reflection to enhance and distort. Time feels elastic, as a two-week, ephemeral event– once saturated with the exotic, the novel and a quickening of the senses – is transformed into an experience of disproportionate longevity, one that defies linear narrative. Paradoxically, time is both elusive and ever present, inescapable – and so too, perhaps, is place.
What’s more, in the very moments of holiday delight and respite, absence and presence wrestle continuously. The need for surrender, for mindfulness and presence, struggles against the creative(and human) compulsion to capture, portray, preserve – to do.
In addition, Greece itself, that location of blissful, sun-drenched beaches and fleeting holidays – a place of lightness – is simultaneously located within weighty history and antiquity; its ubiquitous ruins so integral to the landscape speak of ancient heydays of empire, now rubble, monuments to the paradox of transience and permanence, of presence and absence.
The result of these myriad stimuli is work that revels and wrestles in the overlaps, tensions and paradoxes of the human experience – the interplays and in-betweens so rich and delightful in Sims’s practice. Meaning multiplies in these spaces, in conversations between characters, between different artworks, between image and title, between contrasting emotions, between real and imagined, between anticipation and retrospection. As ever, colour and light play key roles in these dynamics, with Sims’s innate understanding and adroit treatment of light describing, so wonderfully, the dazzling, the dark and the twilight, the experience of both serenity and unease..