NEW YORK, NY.- VeneKlasen, New York, will present Raphaela Simon: On the Street, the artist's first solo exhibition in New York in over eight years, featuring a selection of recent paintings and sculptures.
Inspired by the urban landscape, the works in the exhibition reflect Simon's ongoing engagement with the city—particularly Berlin, where she lives and works. Reducing her subjects to basic geometric forms, stripes, and broad planes of color, Simon distills familiar urban motifs to the point of near illegibility. Her paintings and fabric sculptures alike hover between abstraction and representation, never fully resolving into either. In her fabric sculptures, Simon translates the layered surfaces and fragmented imagery of her paintings into soft, three-dimensional forms, emphasizing the tension between flatness and volume.
Across both mediums, familiar urban motifs are reduced and transformed: brick walls, fences, street drains, apartment buildings, and masked, disembodied heads become almost unrecognizable, while titles such as Blauer Mll (Blue Trash) and Architektur (Architecture) provide subtle interpretive cues. The works oscillate between melancholy and humor, alienation and intimacy, inviting viewers to project their own psychological and emotional associations onto these deceptively simple forms.
Simon’s painterly process is deeply rooted in the material qualities of the medium, involving a gradual accumulation and revision of painted layers. Working through cycles of addition, concealment, and erasure, she repeatedly paints over elements of her initial compositions, allowing traces of earlier forms to remain visible beneath the surface. These subtle remnants of pentimenti lend the works a sense of depth and movement, revealing the physical history of their making. Simon's elaborate soft sculptures, often shown in tandem with her paintings, take the form of stuffed textiles made of fabric, wood, and wire. As in her paintings, figures and objects take shape slowly through addition and revision: pieces are sewn together, stuffed and re-stitched.
Raphaela Simon (b. 1986, Villingen, Germany) studied at the Kunstakademie Dsseldorf and the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich. Recent institutional exhibitions include Oldenburger Kunstverein (2024), Fondazione Giuliani, Rome (2023), and Kunsthalle Dsseldorf (2022). She lives and works in Berlin.
Raphaela Simon: On the Street opens with a reception on Thursday 10 September 2026 from 6-8PM and will remain on view until Saturday 7 November 2026. Gallery hours are Tuesday through Saturday, 10AM-6PM.
