SIMON HADLEY-ATTARD
10- 15 September 2026
Open daily 10am – 5pm
(Last day Tuesday 29th 10am – 1pm)

Simon Hadley Attard is a figurative painter, whose paintings identify with the landscape and visual surroundings of life in England. Subjects such as whippets and lurchers, the artist’s garden, portraits of friends and family, and the art historical canon all play major roles in his painting process. House flies, pot plants and spiders suggest deeper connections of disequilibrium, as the artist explores themes that evoke climate change and the transience of time. More recent work explores themes such as the crucifixion, employing impasto oil colour and pushing the boundaries of oil painting and the marks and textures it is capable of. 
Simon studied at Falmouth School of Art finishing in 2006 and holds an MA from the University of Arts, London.

Artist Statement
As a way of exploring the tension between celebration and mortality, pleasure and pain, this exhibition returns repeatedly to motifs associated with the studios, cafés, banquets and bohemian life of the artist: fruit, smoke, oysters, skulls, absinthe, and, in particular, the painter’s table — perhaps the most familiar piece of furniture in an artist’s studio.

The exhibition is also an exploration of the artist’s ‘myth’ and reflects the broader cultural tendency to romanticize the ‘lone genius’. Something I have always been fascinated with. 

These paintings exist somewhere between darkness and light, life and death, imagination and reality. I have worked from source material that directly references artists such as Picasso and Van Gogh, entering their worlds and reimagining their subjects in an attempt to create an alternative reality — something grittier, perhaps, and closer to the truth behind the myth of the lone genius.

Ultimately, the paintings are concerned with the strange space where beauty and decay coexist; where pleasure carries the shadow of mortality, and where the act of painting itself becomes a way of confronting both.

Private View 6 - 9pm on the 10th September. All Welcome!