Online Exhibition 26 March 29April 2024
simon zabell - mother of many
Square Art Projects is pleased to present Mother of many, an online exhibition of recent paintings by artist Simon Zabell. This is the second solo exhibition of Zabell with Square Art Projects.
Music has always played an important role in the work of Simon Zabell. The infinite textures, rhythms and the 'soul' of music fascinate him, be they from traditional Polynesian music, 60s R&B, or the atonal compositions of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Zabell's work is an attempt at 'transcribing' the idiosyncrasies of music into other mediums, particularly painting, taking aural sensation and translating it into visual phenomena.
Mother of many marks a new departure in his work: whereas until now he has worked on individual projects, each with a clear beginning and end, the way he approaches his work now is an Intuitive, almost freestyle way of working, moving towards a kind of visual language for his transcription of music.
The title of the exhibition Mother of many is inspired by the Mother of Thousands plant, native to Madagascar: just as the plant sprouts new plants, so musical genres produce ever more styles and paths to explore. The exhibition includes some of the works on paper studies which serve as the process ground and experimental space for Zabell, and which use the visual structure of graph paper much in the same way that sheet music relies on the staff for organisation. Rhythmic patterns travel across the paper, formed by a palette of black, white, orange and gold; visual representations of Brownian noise in which the different frequencies of sound create "colours".
Mother of many opens online on 26th March and will run until 28th April.
Read the interview with Simon Zabell
Recent exhibitions at Square Art Projects:
2022. Simon Zabell - The Manchester Contemporary
2018. Beyond the Surface: six abstract painters - Marylebone Church
previous project