Collection: Simon Patterson

Simon Patterson (born 1967, Leatherhead) is a British conceptual artist whose practice centres on the displacement of language and systems of classification. Studying at Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s, Patterson came to wide attention with The Great Bear (1992), a lithograph that reproduces the London Underground map with station names replaced by the names of philosophers, saints, footballers, film stars and other figures — reorganising a familiar navigational system into an absurdist taxonomy of cultural authority.

The work established the terms of a practice that has continued to explore what happens when one ordering system is substituted for another: star charts renamed after Italian painters, airline timetables rewritten with the names of comedians, football league tables replaced by historical figures. The substitution is always precise and the source always legible, which is what allows the displacement to register as both comic and unsettling.

Publications connected to Patterson’s practice — catalogues, artist books, and printed matter — are themselves often sites where language is reorganised, and where the gap between a system and its contents is made visible on the page.