Smile Please

PEER presents Smile Please, a significant new body of ‘painted drawings’ by Simon English, accompanied by other recent works on paper and rarely seen sculptural assemblages created by the artist between 2014 and 2018.

Although English’s drawings have been widely exhibited since the early 1990s, he only began making sculptural installations in 2014 and Smile Please is the first UK presentation of a new large-scale sculptural installation. PEER’s street window will be transformed into a huge vitrine displaying assemblages created from discarded materials collected on English’s many walks around London. Some works are simply re- contextualised detritus, others have a more intentional grandeur. Like the drawings, the temperaments of these works fluctuate, but exhibited collectively they exude a playfulness and pure enjoyment at the re-purposing and re-animating of the discarded.