Sayre Gomez Sim City
Sayre Gomez's third exhibition at Xavier Hufkens, Sim City, brings together a new body of paintings, figurative sculptures, and works on paper that continue his enduring engagement with the urban framework that defines the landscape of Los Angeles. Sim City wrestles with the representations of a place that is itself a symbol of artifice. The city emerges as a cultural construction—a protagonist and backdrop, home and fantasy, paradise and myth. Los Angeles may be the only city whose identity can be summoned through images that are almost entirely generic: a palm tree, a sunset, a stretch of freeway, yet beneath these images lies a city whose histories, infrastructures, politics, and climate remain inseparable from the conditions they obscure, an optimism and dread occupying the same horizon.
Sayre Gomez (b. 1982, Chicago, USA) lives and works in Los Angeles. Selected institutional solo exhibitions include Enterprise at Sifang Art Museum, Jiangsu, China (2022); and Renaissance Collection at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin, Italy (2022), among others. Gomez’s works are held in the public collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami; mumok, Vienna.
