Simon Schubert

In Le EL, Simon Schubert appropriates the iconic surrealism of Rene Magritte’s 1937 painting, Not To Be Reproduced, where the viewer is confronted by a rear-view image of a man gazing into a mirror, and the same view jarringly repeated in the mirror. Constructing this image in sculptural form, Schubert further complicates this notion of illusion as reflective of psychological state. Converging the horror of dream-space with the three dimensionality of the ‘real’ world, Schubert’s figure and reflection extends beyond pictorial suggestion. Placed in front of a mirror, Schubert’s sculpture encapsulates the viewer and gallery space as an extension of the scene, drawing all into the disturbing tableau of emotional isolation and inner torment. Influenced by the surrealists and the writings of Samuel Beckett, Simon Schubert draws upon the absurd to visualise sensations of isolation and anxiety, and engage with ideas of existence. The concept of ‘disappearing’ – as a moral and psychological erasure – is a recurring theme in his work. In Untitled, Schubert presents a woman in a bath, completely engulfed by her own hair. Schubert’s sculpture posits a relational empathy through the tactility of his materials, where sensations of revulsion, cloyingness, and suffocation convert the unreality of dreams to physical manifestation. The casing of the tub doubles as both inverted ‘plinth’ and pristine coffin, creating an uncanny parallel between death, art and subconscious aberration.