Julian Simon's "I’ve been looking for freedom" features a muted color palette with soft browns and beiges forming the backdrop. The central focus is a textured, clay-like form painted with a face, integrating humor into an otherwise realistic, bodily depiction. The painting's style merges pop art elements with traditional realistic techniques, showcasing a playful yet meticulous approach. This work reflects Simon's exploration of layered memories and emotions, offering a quirky perspective on personal and generational themes shaped by his Berlin environment and experiences during lockdown. ...
Born in Wermelskirchen in 1994, Julian Simon lives and works in Berlin, where he studied painting at the Weißensee Academy of Fine Arts.
Torn from the Berlin parties he portrayed in his early years, Julian Simon reinvents his artistic practice during the lockdowns by modeling little sculptures of clay, and reproducing them with oil paint. Childlike in their rough forms and pop colors, these clay sculptures contrast with the linearity of the realistic scenes depicted in the background, which are often anodyne scenes of life meticulously reproduced. Julian Simon thus creates intimate paintings made up of layers of memories, dreams and mental sentences, materialized by the shapes formed from modeling clay which, without much concern for coherence with the context, disorients and tints each composition with mystery, weirdness and humor. Through his distinctive artistic language, Julian Simon offers a realistic, yet offbeat perspective on the ailments of the Generation Y. ...
