IN THE GALLERY: DISRUPTIONS

Simon Degroot

11 Jul - 9 Aug 2025

DISRUPTIONS are a pervasive condition of life. Through abstract painting, Degroot explores the creative potential of interruption to create space and opportunities for renewal. Stylised gestures overlap hard-edge forms in works that reflect a process of redemption in disruption.

In our current moment, disruption has shifted from exception to norm. We live in a world of constant upheaval, where the unprecedented becomes routine and stability feels increasingly elusive. Rather than treating these interruptions as problems to solve, Simon Degroot’s paintings embrace them as creative catalysts, transforming everyday turbulence into opportunities for artistic renewal. Through the interplay of gestural marks and hard-edge forms, his work establishes visual dialogues that reflect the challenge and potential of finding purpose within uncertainty.
Degroot draws on constructivist traditions, collage, and post-painterly abstraction to develop a visual language that both constructs and deconstructs. This dual process mirrors the way we navigate and reconstruct systems in a constantly changing world. His use of hard-edge elements disrupted by expressive gestures generates tension that resonates with contemporary lived experience.
Central to Degroot’s practice is a focus on interruptions in the built and visual environment—architectural details, urban fragments, and overlooked moments that punctuate daily life. These elements, reconfigured through flat colour fields and layered collage, become formal devices that explore the fragility of contemporary existence. For Degroot, this fragility is not a flaw but a condition of creativity—an opportunity to engage with the world through adaptation and transformation.
The resulting works offer viewers engagement rather than escape, and productive discomfort rather than false comfort. They invite an appreciation of instability not as failure, but as a generative state. In Degroot’s paintings, renewal is found not by returning to a prior stability but by discovering energy and insight within flux itself.
Each canvas serves as a site where fixed forms reveal their fluid nature. Through the act of painting, Degroot transforms disruption from a source of anxiety into a space for contemplation and reinvention. These visual propositions offer models for engaging with the fragmented present, not as retreats from uncertainty, but as guides for navigating it with purpose and creativity.

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