“As he peered through the window of a shop full of strange odds and ends, Simon Wald-Lasowski’s heart skipped a beat.”

My most ambitious project to date was developed during my residency at the Jan van Eyck Academie and presented during the open studios in March 2017. The centre of this overwhelming physical tableaux of textures, colours, furniture and smells consists of 35 plaster monkey sculptures. This installation was sparked by my fascination with a found ceramic sidetable in the form of a chimp with a book balanced on its head. The image represented perfectly my contradictory relationship to knowledge and had a deep visceral impact on me. I had a mould made of the original and reproduced 35 alternate copies by hand.

The creature proved to be a perfect vehicle for addressing a range of themes that had long occupied my attention, such as a fondness for kitsch and cheap symbolism, an interest in hand crafting and a passion for materials, the burden of the world’s immense quantity of knowledge and a fascination with throwaway objects. Furthermore, the work was influenced among others by theories of the abject, the aura in mass produced items, the uncanny and the sublime. Loving provocation and satire, it was no coincidence that I should present a work dealing with the pressure of knowledge in an art institution mostly know as a space for theoretical research…

Just something I want to explain about the place