New Zealand b. 1975

Simon Edwards was born in Christchurch in 1975 and graduated from Ilam, the University of Canterbury’s School of Fine Arts in 1997. That same year he was a finalist in the Cranleigh Barton Drawing award, and he began to exhibit regularly in 1998. Edwards has become noted for his depictions of sweeping landscapes, possibly in a nod to his rural childhood on the Canterbury Plains. The works have a pervading sense of melancholic stillness, and like both Turner and Constable before him, Edwards painstakingly builds up his minimal palette to create his paintings. Edwards features in both public and private collections in  New Zealand as well as internationally, and in 2005 was the recipient of the  “People’s Choice Award” in the prestigious Anthony Harper Art Prize.

Exhibitions

2005 The ‘Peoples Choice Award’ for the Anthony Harper Award in Contemporary Art

2005 New Paintings Janne Land Gallery, Wellington

2006 Solo Exhibition COCA, Centre of Contemporary Art, Christchurch.

2007 Looking South, Milford Gallery, Dunedin

       West Park, Milford Gallery, Queenstown.

2007 New Paintings Janne Land Gallery, Wellington

2008 Masterworks, Milford Gallery, Queenstown

2010 Winter Show, Milford Gallery, Queenstown

Simon Edwards lives and works in Christchurch and is represented in numerous private collections and the collection of the Christchurch Art Gallery Te Puna o Waiwhetu.

Artist’s Statement

"The landscape has been the source of my work…The work places itself somewhere between a modernistic reliance on the essential qualities (of the materials and methods of painting), and an awareness of traditional forms of the landscape. I use this as a departure point, for entering into a process of layering and rubbing back, setting up a dialogue between the medium, the landscape, and myself. The work becomes a result of reacting to what is happening on the surface at the time, and building on chance effects that present themselves, contributing to a sense of space, distance and movement”.