SIMONE GAD (1947-2021)
With great sadness we announce the passing of our beloved Simone Gad. She was a force of perseverance and independence in the Los Angeles art community. We feel very fortunate to have worked with her, shown her art, and had her as a friend. In her later years she had the duality of being physically fragile but with a spirit that was relentless.
Best known for her collage drawings, Simone’s playful, brutal, sexual, and kinetic pieces oscillate with vulnerability, trauma, and magnetism. She approached subjects, which focussed on models and rescue animals, with humor and empathy. Her own experience of being unprotected as a teen actress in Hollywood resonates through the work. In 2019 she participated in the three person exhibition Stuck Together at Track 16. Her last exhibition was the 2020 online show The Siren Shores.
Simone and I had a visit scheduled this Sunday. She was excited to show me the new work she’d been making. We were all so relieved she had made it through her hospitalization in 2020. It’s now hard to absorb that she couldn’t soldier on forever. I’m very sorry to have to share this news with all of those who loved her. Simone, we are going to miss you greatly.
–Sean Meredith, Director, Track 16
Jean AKA John Numero 24589755 Besoin Famille Avec Pinups, 2017/2019
Oil pastel, ink, and collage on paper.
14 x 17 inches
#sg0178
MEMORIAL SERVICE
Held on April 17, 2021 – her birthday
Saved by Simone Gad and Other Souvenirs
Simone Gad (1947-2021): Les Souvenirs, sauvetages, et jouets jetés bien-chéris de mon amie inoubliable
by Ezrha Jean Black | Apr 29, 2021
ABOUT SIMONE GAD
Simone Gad (1947-2021, born in Belgium) was mentored in the early seventies by Wallace Berman and Al Hansen. She made paintings, assemblage works, was a performance artist, and was most known for her collage drawings. She also began acting as a teen and in her later years was sought after as a character actor. Her Polish parents, who survived the Holocaust, moved the family to the Boyle Heights neigborhood of Los Angeles in 1951. She was generous and fragile, a treasure and a stalwart. In recent years as she struggled with multiple serious health issues, she continued her prolific art making.
In her collages, models and animals – many of whom have gone through obvious trauma – all make eye contact with the viewer. Whether the subjects are dispassionate, playful, or strung out, you feel the eyes challenging you. Drawn with immediacy as if the medium was applied in one continuous stroke without ever leaving the paper, these vibrating animals tug on our heart strings for rescuing, but then these human portraits – the collage element – offset printed onto cheap magazine stock also look to you and ask “is there no empathy for the humans in this artwork?” Then the interplay between the two subjects and the idea that they may rescue each other in some alternate reality becomes a dominating narrative. This long running series is the culmination Gad’s life and career exploring form, sexuality, trauma, and healing.
Her painting is influenced greatly by the Art Brut movement and works such as the thick impasto paintings of Frank Auerbach and the organic violence of Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture. These abstracted facades of Brussels art nouveau buildings and Los Angeles’s Chinatown are dense, thick constructions, created with thick layers of acrylic paint. The work creates a tension of barely balanced architectural shapes.
In Riot Material, Genie Davis wrote about Gad’s three person exhibition Stuck Together at Track 16 in 2019, "Her thickly textured acrylic paintings are somewhat amorphous in meaning, both patterned and dream-like abstracts whose subjects are architectural in nature. Her collages, however, are somehow both sorrowful, touching, and playful combinations of images, rescued animals overlaid on vintage nude pinups, beautifully expressing ideas of both vulnerability and rescue.”
