John Simon

John F. Simon I has been producing art professionally for almost 20 years beginning with hand and pen plotter drawings and progressing through Internet Art to finally arrive at his own practice of ‘coding as creative writing’. The main way that he show’s his Software Art is through sculptural wall hangings with LCD screens that he calls ‘art appliances’ and have made and sold since 1999.

Simon also makes drawings and paintings daily in the ‘traditional’ media of gouache and pencil. Color Panel v1.0, his first ‘art appliance’ was published as an edition of 12 and shown at the Sandra Gering Gallery in New York in 1999. It was acquired at that time by the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Shortly after, his premier piece of Internet based Software Art, called ‘Every Icon’, was included in the 2000 Biennial Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art. His work was shown again at the Whitney Museum in 2001 in their survey of computer-based work ‘BitStreams’. This show included large-scale versions of earlier software works now titled Color Panel v1.5 and CPU v1.5.

Simon has shown new work with the Sandra Gering Gallery regularly for 14 years (it recently expanded and is now the Gering & Lopez Gallery). He had his 7th solo show there in the Fall of 2007. His work has international exposure including large surveys like Media City Seoul 2002 (Seoul, Korea) and Flower Power at the Musee des Beaus-Arts in Lille, France. And most recently I will have a solo show in Galeria Javier Lopez, 2008 ( Madrid, Spain) and a retrospective with a catalog at Collezione Maramotti, 2009, (Bologna, Italy).