Far from the sterile depictions of insects we often encounter in textbooks and laboratories, Lily Simonson’s lush paintings of insect lifetime are dramatic, sensual and dripping with paint. Her exhibition “Wet and Wild” depicts insects not just as biological critters however as living beings, as sexual and mortal as humans, if not more so.Simonson channels figure painting’s flow, abstract expressionism’s flair for the dramatic and pop art’s fascination with under-appreciated imagery in her surprisingly textured works. As her insects slither and writhe, bathing in intense shadows and glowing in the blaze, their grotesque appearances gain an entrancing, nearly seductive beauty. Simonson makes an insect soap opera, capturing moments of cinematic climax, complete of romance, eroticism, danger and death. Just as the microscopic creatures are blown up to gargantuan scale, so are their weird urges.Weaving art and science Simonson shows the weird beauty of a bug’s biology. She depicts physical makeups so bizarre they would be dense to conjure up in the human imagination, and yet they are absolute. Glance at More…
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