Untitled Art | Guy Simpson: Running Parallel

‘Running Parallel’, Guy Simpson’s first solo exhibition in Johannesburg, considers place as a physical entity as well as a construct that shapes our experience of the world.

The exhibition draws inspiration from Louis Botha Avenue — famed as a traffic-jammed melting pot of eclectic shops, rushing taxis, potholes, chancers and pedestrians — the 9.2km stretch that forms part of Johannesburg’s arterial network, cutting through the city’s north-eastern quarters through Houghton and Orange Grove—places both familiar and distant for Simpson, who grew up in the latter. Nearby, Shepstone Gardens, located just off the avenue’s northern edge, serves as a significant site for this new body of work, grounding it more tangibly, and perhaps more overtly, in the thematic concerns that have shaped Simpson’s practice in recent years.

‘Running Parallel’ is a constellation of gestural compositions, a kind of rigorous abstraction rooted in figuring out place: its markings and makings.

Simpson is deep in experimentation, absorbing the push and pull of intersecting mediums, methods and materials as he teases out a new language for painting. Drawing on memories, found images and his affinity for detail, he condenses these into a portfolio that moves between small and large scale, textured and precise, two and three-dimensional objects. From intimate paintings of interiors of his childhood home (broken blinds, shelves, bedroom locks, nails), layered canvases reflecting exterior walls of houses in Johannesburg and spatial compositions in the form of hanging sculptures and old shoes placed on salvaged Parquet floor from his old home, Simpson merges traditional painting approaches with a new way of making.

In his wall paintings, made from acrylic, wall paint and canvas, texture is vivid, creating a sense that the paintings are assemblages or collages, speaking to a method that stretches and shifts boundaries by way of tessellation and juxtaposition. Built from two layers of canvas: a base layer painted upon, and a top layer with small cavities that expose fragments of the bottom layer, Simpson’s wall paintings play at materiality and memory — cracks and clouds, roses and dollhouses, or at least allusions to them — become deconstructions, fictive interpretations and reinterpretations of the particularities of place.

His latest experiment, what he refers to as “hanging paintings”, introduces a new kind of structured painting. Fabricated from lining tubes matching the diameter of traffic light poles, and based on Google Street View images of Louis Botha Avenue, these works are suspended just a few centimetres above the ground, clustered in formations that reflect the urban infrastructure and spatial tension of Louis Botha. A play between grounding and suspension, the works gesture toward the instability of place that lies at the core of his inquiry.

Though conceptually speaking to a sense of precarity present not only in Johannesburg but on Louis Botha Avenue itself, ‘Running Parallel’ teases out the activity of painting itself—how the sensation of place can be rendered through the medium, in all its formulations and permutations.

This show runs 22nd - 25th May 2025.