Simon Konrad
Covers Up

Covers Up presents a series of paintings by Simon Konrad at Caprii, Düsseldorf. Across one large frieze — titled Occupation (2025) — and a gathering of smaller oils on canvas, Konrad approaches his paintings as containers for time, both in an art-historical context and within the construction of the paintings themselves. The works traverse their own timelines from the first mark made to the last.

Konrad’s frieze, upon which smaller works are hung, is site specific; made according to the dimensions of the gallery wall. Occupation (2025) serves as the point of departure for Covers Up. The now cloudy surface formerly functioned as a landscape before Konrad washed the work in grey. Motifs borrowed from French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix or from etchings by Francisco de Goya were arranged on the panels as preparatory line drawings before Konrad’s murky overpainting. These compositions were painted in latex paint which allowed for the linework to endure in relief. In the lower part of the frieze — the panel second from the right — it’s just possible to make out a standing figure borrowed from Goya’s And his house is on fire etching from his Los Caprichos portfolio (1799), even through the monochrome layers. The act of obfuscation functions as a conceptual levelling: the at-one-time obvious references to great painters become barely perceptible in the finished article. The frieze is a chronological work and history fades to the back.

Konrad considers his comparatively miniature canvases as fragments — artifacts almost — of the expanse on which they sit. Extractions of what is hidden behind them, they are framed by monumentality but exist on a different timeline. If their mother represents the mass accumulation of knowledge and imagery collected in the artist’s mind over a lifetime, these smaller works illustrate only a moment. These are sudden and fast paintings. Punctuation marks. In painterly tradition, smaller studies would be made to explore ideas in preparation for larger and more meticulous works. Konrad chooses to invert this dynamic in Covers Up. Here, the artist’s fragments are hung centre stage, a proclamation of the author’s attitudes to traditional hierarchies.

Earth pigments make up the base of these works and from this ground the paintings are built, at times climaxing in bold colour. In Depreciation of the Useful (2025) a horizon line implies a foreground and background but the pair of melded figures are situated in neither field. Instead suspended between sandy foreground and ocre background, these figures are no one and their environment is nowhere.

In Konrad's mind his smaller works only truly begin when they reach a point where the painting’s past can itself become a medium. The build up of layers allows for play with time: one scratch of the painting’s surface can break through the painting’s plane and into its history. In Container (2025) a bulky figure dominates the composition, his oversized coat hiding something unknown. Rendered in white tempora, the overcoat turns pink in parts, diluted by a painting from the past lying underneath the surface but now erased from view. Konrad etches into the history of these works, drawing into what is already there. This removal of material, breaking the plane with irreversible gestures of subtraction, exists in opposition to the overpainting of Occupation (2025) where the frieze’s past lives remain sealed inside its layers. Across these works Konradgrapples with the push and pull of tradition. Many of the exhibited works began with art historical references which became mutated as paint accumulates. Relief and texture are the solitary traces left of the artist’s own psyche. Konrad presents only fragments — paintings where context is obliterated — negatives of the artist’s conscious and unconscious.