Simon Linke (b. 1958, Benalla, Australia) is a British artist, best known for making paintings based on Artforum advertisements since 1985. Often made on a 1:1 scale with the magazine, the paintings are rendered in thick oil paint lending a wildly expressive surface to the contrasting graphic image. Arresting Artforum's iconic monthly bulletins announcing the "new" in a relief of thickly applied paint, Linke's paintings express the ideal of stability where there is none, flipping the temporal nature of an exhibition notice on its head. Focusing largely on recognizable blue chip artists and galleries, the paintings' compact size and precise articulation offer an ironic contrast to the overwhelming scale and volume of the contemporary art market from which their subjects are derived. The work explores themes around contemporary art and permanence, history, subjectivity and the market while referring to On Kawara and Hanne Darboven in terms of seriality and repetition, and Andy Warhol and Sherrie Levine in relation to questions of authenticity and authorship.
Linke’s works have been exhibited in several museums and institutions, among all: Le Consortium in Dijon, FRAC Limousin, Deste Foundation in Athens, Galleria Civica in Modena, Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Fondazione Re Rebaudengo Sandretto in Turin, The National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, The National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto and at the Biennale of Venice in 1988. He has works in a number of public collections including Tate, London, Fondazione Re Rebaudengo Sandretto in Turin, Italy and FRAC Limousin, France.