Simon Degroot | Manual Handling

30 September - 18 October 2025

Manual Handling

This exhibition challenges the idea that historical artworks should remain untouchable. Instead of treating canonical paintings as sacred objects for quiet contemplation, I approach them as surfaces to claim, disrupt, and reimagine. We understand art differently when we can touch and manipulate it—physical engagement reveals dimensions of meaning that visual analysis alone cannot access.

These works contextualise my studio research exploring and challenging legacies of art historical hard-edge abstraction through contemporary response. While a traditional pedagogical practice of copying masterworks is to learn technique, I copy to critique, question, and liberate. This copying becomes an act of creative rebellion questioning works that are already circulating in the ecology of visual culture in other ways.

My practice centres on somatic knowledge—learning through the body, through handling materials, through physical gesture. With paint-covered hands, I deliberately disturb the clean precision of hard-edge painting. I add messy, interruptive, accidental, unapologetically decorative elements that challenge the permanence and purity represented by the original works. My painted marks become active participants in dialogue with works from art history.

By recreating these works by Kazimir Malevich, Piet Mondrian, Henri Matisse, Jean (Hans) Arp, Alexander Calder, Ellsworth Kelly, Josef Albers, and John Coburn—male artists who I can interrogate and who form some of my studio influences—create opportunities for direct engagement and investigation. These works are an homage, but they are also about poking canonical works in the eye, handling them with the irreverence needed to keep them alive and relevant.

This approach offers alternative ways of relating to my own artistic heritage—not as static monuments to be preserved unchanged, but as living materials to be handled, questioned, and transformed. Art history becomes a participatory practice rather than a static, protected archive, inviting physical investigation alongside intellectual analysis. Art history is part of everyday experience and is an ongoing dialogue that belongs to everyone. By physically engaging with these paintings, I can connect with works that are typically placed beyond reach, collapsing distant objects and bringing them into the contemporary moment through direct contact.

- Simon Degroot 2025