Artist Simon Aldridge was born in London and is now based in New York. A degree in Environmental Studies from University College London allowed Aldridge to create a proposal for a roadside sensing space – a series of screens through which horizontal streams of vehicular traffic could be read as a kind of kinetic painting. This proposal won the Royal Institute of British Architects Medal – the highest award attainable by a student in Britain.

Aldridge’s introduction to the United States was through a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard University which allowed him to study at both the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts and the Harvard Design School – maintaining studios in both and working in two and three dimensions. Since 1994 his work has included sculpture, painting, video and site specific work. Light, movement, and focus have been consistent themes throughout.

His latest paintings deliberately employ the most traditional materials; the oil, linen and canvas, combined with a sculptor’s attention to material. The oil paint is blurred together in horizontal strips, the images built up not dot by dot, but strip by strip, more Epson or HP than Monet or Seurat. For 2007 Aldridge has developed a specially blended cold wax medium to mix with his pigments, which makes the paint he works with both more slippery, and more translucent. Custom-built wood supports are carefully dimensioned so that the paintings have a sculptural thickness, and the surface itself is built up in multiple layers to build a complex matte finish.

Aldridge’s work deliberately blurs the boundaries between the artificial and the real - blending flatness and mass, analogue and digital and in so doing achieving a subtle blend of realism and abstraction.

Simon Aldridge has exhibited in both the United States and Europe, most recently at P.S.1 Moma, The New Museum and Artist’s Space in New York, and at the Kunsthalle Fridericianum, Kassel, Germany. He has received numerous awards including a Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard in 1996, the Robert Gavron Award in 1998, and a Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant in 2001. In 2001 Aldridge was awarded a World Views Residency on the 91st Floor of the World Trade Center, New York.