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| Simon Foxall, Everlasting Love, oil on canvas, 50x40 cm, 2022 |
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| Simon Foxall, Studio |
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| Simon Foxall, oil on canvas, 2022 |
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| Studio |
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| Simon Foxall, Amoreuse, oil on canvas, 50x40 cm, 2022 |
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| Simon Foxall, Lilos on Lake Margherita, oil on canvas, 120x90 cm, 2023 |
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| Simon Foxall, Lilos on Lake Margherita, detail |
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| Simon Foxall, Lilos on Lake Margherita, detail |
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| Simon Foxall, Bianca Bontà , oil on canvas, 40x50 cm, 2023 |
I am a British artist, based in Italy (near Asti) since 2020, where I have my studio. I was born in Saudi Arabia in 1983, and grew up in rural Worcestershire (hills and green woodland) before completing a BA Fine Art Painting at Brighton University, and an MA in Painting at the Royal College of Art in London. After living in Brighton (sea), London (city), Margate (sea) and Barcelona (sea and city), I finally returned to hills and green woodland, but this time in Piemonte rather than Worcestershire.
My work deals with queerness, otherness, surrealism and the grotesque while placing that conversation in a sense of tangible time and space. My work has always changed energy as I moved to different places, absorbing something of the spirit of an environment. A specificity of space and my feelings about it emerges in conversation with the cast of characters I populate these spaces with. At the moment they are all smiling, like we were told to do in photos as kids! I find smiling to be the most ambiguous facial expression.
The characters explore contemporary and classic iconography, melted together, inspired by pop culture, drag queens, celebrity, fetish-wear, cowboys, comedy, neo gothic, horror, fantasy and bad taste, heavily influenced by the simultaneously flamboyant and earnest imagery and of medieval, gothic and Neoclassical genres.
When I am not oil painting, I make heaps of charcoal drawings and watercolours. All beginnings and suggestions, some big some small, a kind of visual stone-skimming, seeing what might bounce.
Simon Foxall
