Simon Patterson

British artist Simon Patterson (born 1967 in Leatherhead, Surrey) plays with metaphors. Working across a wide variety of media, including painting, sculpture, film and architectural projects, the artist co-ops the presentational capacities of trusted representations of information, from the underground map to the periodic table, from type-writers to electrical circuits, subverting their claim to certainty, by replacing the names of tube stations, electrical breakers, chemicals, or letters of the alphabet with the names of musicians, movies stars, or the kings and queens of England. Rendered in sharp colour, indexical formations and graphic lines, Patterson's work detours reason through its own image, producing loose and lively plays of signification, escaping certainty, and yielding an encounter with the unlikely, the illogical, and the unexpected.