Simon Denny: Feb 22, 2024
At Dunkunsthalle in Spring 2024. 'Metaverse Landscapes' on the New Models Podcast.
DKH Recommends | Simon Denny: Metaverse Landscapes
This past July, Berlin-based artist Simon Denny’s exhibition Metaverse Landscapes opened at Kunstverein, Hannover. The show comprises a series of oil-and-UV paintings of metaverse land parcels up for sale, and explores the role of artistic abstraction in speculative markets throughout history. Denny recently appeared on New Models podcast for an insightful discussion about his works, and the larger concept of value within the art market.
Upon first glance, the paintings in Metaverse Landscapes don’t immediately present as landscapes, but in depicting land for sale Denny explains how his work dialogs with the history of European colonial landscape painting. It was common practice for colonial powers or trading companies to commission landscape paintings of newly seized lands in order to advertise the allegedly “uninhabited wilderness” of their settler outposts as both a new frontier, and savvy investment.
While drawing from a different visual language, the frontier lands of the metaverse come similarly pre-imagined. Denny’s paintings reference the images used to sell land–tokens on marketplaces like OpenSea (an expansionist homage in itself). However, as Denny explains rather than referencing the Eden-like paradise of Neo-classical landscapes, the digital frontier is rhetorically coded in the Modernist notion of space as a grid of squares, along with the efficiency, adaptability, and independence intimated therein.
Works from ‘Metaverse Landscapes’ will be touring across Europe and the US. Dunkunsthalle will be proudly exhibiting Simon Denny in Spring of 2024.
To hear the full in-depth conversation check out the
podcast linked below.
Simon Denny’s exhibition with Dunkunsthalle is scheduled for Spring of 2024
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