Simon Ogden
Simon Ogden was born in 1956 in Bradford, England. He was a student in England during the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, graduating from Birmingham Polytechnic in Sculpture with a first class Honours degree and, later, from the Royal College of Art with Masters in Painting. He lives and works in Christchurch, New Zealand, and until recently was Associate Professor at the School of Fine Arts at the University of Canterbury. His studio work encompasses painting, printmaking and sculpture. Simon is one of the few artists in the world working with antique and ‘found’ linoleum materials to produce beautiful landscapes.
Simon’s work draws heavily from his long held interest in European, English and American Modernism and Surrealism. His work interweaves artistic concerns with personal passions opening the door to a more varied dialogue, one that contains figuration and symbolic references to the landscape and the body. His interests move across painting, object making, design, printmaking, photography and drawing. Each of these areas of creative activity reinforces, feeds and extends the possibilities of his continuing artistic practice. He is an avid collector of materials and an obsessive viewer of environments, surfaces, history and forms.
Simon Ogden was Artist-in-Residence at the Dunmoochin Foundation, Melbourne in 1994. He says this residency was pivotal to the development of his art career – before 1994 he had worked exclusively as an abstract painter. His residency at Dunmoochin was a deliberate attempt to bring subject matter to the forefront of his painting. He has exhibited extensively and his work is included in numerous private and public collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London.
Exhibitions:
2023 – Con.form.i.ty
2021 – Digging in the dirt for diamonds
2018 – Quiet Negotiations
Essay by Damien Wilkins about Simon Ogden’s lino work