Review: Horoscope by Beth Simcock

Beth Simcock’s bright and colourful large-scale work The Zodiac lights up the exhibition space at Oxford’s Modern Art Gallery. A recent Ruskin graduate and one of the winners of the Platform Graduate Award, this is Beth’s first solo exhibition, open to the public until 31st of October. The grand stature of the piece impresses upon the viewer immediately, comprising 12 canvasses each representative of a different astrological sign. Alongside the painting, a horoscope written by Simcock contextualizes the piece as well as adding further layers of meaning. 

Visually, I love Beth’s vibrant and unique style of magical realism which is dominated by reds, pinks and glitter. Exploring themes of memory and storytelling are central to her practice which is reflected in this work through ideas of collage and things being obscured. Practically, using acrylic paint enabled Simcock to create this feeling of nostalgia by working in layers. The act of spraying things out and repainting them, as well as making use of the plastic medium to incorporate mistakes as part of the piece, seen concealed but visible under layers, literally reflects the process of doing and undoing which she foregrounds as integral to creativity itself. 

Simcock’s inspiration and references for the work span a diverse range from historical tapestries to modern popular culture as well as including auto-biographical elements. Working in two directions, the piece scans both left to right, driven by the repeated bright baby pink horses and dogs which leap across the canvasses, and in a cyclical fashion which mirrors the act of reading the zodiac itself. As a motif, the horse plays a central role in several of Simcock’s paintings as a personal in-joke with herself. Layers of meaning are created through this motif by referencing the horse as a prominent figure in art-history and therefore tying the work into the tradition of painting, whilst directly referencing the Bayeux tapestry with their positioning and figurative representation and simultaneously exploring horses as a reflection of different modes of femininity. 

In terms of genre, Simcock describes her work as narrative paintings which aim to capture scenes to do with memory and the relationships between people and objects. In this piece, a couple of the figures are self-portraits functioning as references to the self as well as capturing the work’s historical context as Simcock was painting in an empty studio due to covid regulations but, of course, could use herself as a model. Some other figures are paintings of friends and family members who posed for the work, and the rest are amalgamated faces, combining multiple people and their features drawn from collected drawings and reference images, a process which Simcock charmingly terms “Chinese whispers with drawings”. The Zodiac is a highly creative, engaging and thought-provoking work, feeling relevant within modernity yet also reflecting the past – definitely worth a visit!

Image: Rosa Bonnin