Simon Starling provokes unexpected crossings between objects, materials and events. He produces hybrid works that seem to come from another space-time continuum. In 1995, he used the aluminium from a chair designed by Jorge Pensi to reproduce nine copies of a beer can found on the Bauhaus site in Dessau, thus creating a condensed history of design in a rather trivial object, turning a piece of rubbish found by chance into the clue of a historical lineage neither absurd nor authentic.
While avoiding formal creation ex nihilo, the artist paradoxically behaves like a true demiurge. His works imply processes of metamorphosis quite similar to alchemy. He appropriates forms and objects and integrates them into complex networks of meaning which do not aim at revealing a hidden history but rather at drawing unseen paths that ultimately exist only because of his intervention.
Simon Starling was born in 1967 in Epsom, UK. He lives and works in Copenhagen and Berlin.