Unlike City Guides

Irish Artist Simon McWilliams brings his unique perspective on the urban landscape to the heart of Culver City’s art district with an exhibition of his new paintings at Skotia Gallery, Los Angeles. McWilliams takes his observations of the city around him and filters them through his bold, painterly imagination. What he delivers is a fictional developing city, housing mysterious forms cloaked with impasto paint, reminiscent of Christo’s wrapped buildings. Not a drab concrete city but a new optimistic metropolis, resplendent in abundant, tactile colours, promising, “a glorious morrow”.

 

Capturing a kind of grand and dizzying chaos that is both beautiful and alarming. By doing so for purely visual reasons the potential for analogy to our own crazy civilization and it’s dazzling potential for demise is made all the more powerful. Yet, this is visual work first, conceptual second.