Madeline Simm’s paintings evolve as a continual negotiation between structure and sensation, where measured geometries hold a pulse of intuition and colour, creating a tactile sensation. Her compositions, meticulously mapped before execution, reveal a sensibility attuned to rhythm and balance, recalling the mystical colour theories of Johannes Itten, who urged students to find their own chromatic affinities through contrast and polarity. Simm, too, embraces colour’s subjective charge, wielding it as both an organizing force and a conduit for emotional expression.
At the heart of this exhibition, Inflorescence, is about growth, how a thought can unfold through line and ideas bloom through hue and form. Her compositions, some revisited in variations, suggest a sequential approach, however resist repetition by introducing differences in colour, texture and form. Freehand lines, some invoking floral motifs, act as organic counterpoints to the structure of her gridded arrangements. In this, Simm aligns herself with artists like Renée Levi, whose spontaneous, calligraphic gestures uncover form as they emerge, as well as with the legacies of Hilma af Klint and Georgia O’Keeffe, who used floral structures as scaffolds for self-expression and chromatic exploration.
Despite its engagement with the historical languages of abstraction - from Mondrian’s disciplined harmonies to Malevich’s spiritual geometries - Simm’s work remains firmly rooted in lived experience. Her colours are drawn from both theory and from the landscapes she moves through the interiors she inhabits, and the textiles she encounters. They are observed, remembered, transcribed into small pencil studies, tested in sketchbooks, and later transposed onto canvas, where hand-mixed pigments result in surfaces that oscillate between solid and textured, depth and reflectivity. In certain works, form and space merge in an exchange of full and empty space, creating a shifting visual experience.
The grid, in Simm’s hand, is both playful and purposeful. There is a deep engagement with textures, luminosities, and differing intensities, her paintings are joyous and vibrate with life.
