Simon Ling was born in 1968. He studied at Chelsea College of Art & Design and then at the Slade School of Art in London. Exhibitions include: Kunsthalle, Bergen, 2015; Painting Now: Five Contemporary Artists, Tate Britain, London, 2013; Camden Arts Centre, London, 2009; Islington Museum, London, 2005 and John Moores Exhibition, Liverpool, 1991. Ling lives and works in London. 

Simon Ling produces richly textured oil paintings on canvas which focus in on details of both urban and natural landscapes, often littered with the debris of human lives. The tight angle and slight distortion with which the works are framed, causes a sense of disorientation in the viewer, making it impossible to grasp senses of scale or context. Ling’s work explores a tension between the represented image and its material construction through paint and he is interested in creating ‘something’ out of ‘nothing ’ elevating through paint an overlooked corner of a city. He works out-doors building up his paintings from a sketch made it bright orange, which continues to show through and animate the finished painting, the wonky perspectives perhaps being readable as a moving easel or the need to slightly move location.  

In Untitled (2013), Ling's subject is an anonymous shop font in an average street. The absence of signage, candy colours and warped perspective bring a sense of intense subjectivity to a nondescript scene. Ling draws our attention to the way in which our experience of the world is made specific by the way we move through it, his vision is more physical; as he puts it, ‘it is a question of how you see something, not what it is.
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