Simon Hitchens graduated in sculpture at Bristol Polytechnic in 1990. He predominantly worked in stone until 2000 when he started to use glass and resin. He has exhibited his work extensively throughout the world since 1990 including shows at the Peggy Guggenheim collection Venice, Art Dubai, the Royal Academy, Spica Museum Tokyo, Jerwood Space London and the Cass Sculpture Foundation at Goodwood.

Simon Hitchens is an Elected Fellow of the Royal British Society of Sculptors. He is the winner of the 2003 Millfield School Sculpture Competition was short listed for the Jerwood Sculpture Prize in 2004. He frequently exhibits in solo and group exhibitions and has undertaken many private commissions. His most recent public commissions include: From dawn until dusk, Boscombe Pier entrance, Bournemouth (2008): Parallel presence, Ability Group, Isle of Dogs, London (2007), Coastline, Workington, Cumbria (2006): Shining Silence, opposite Harrods, London (2003). Hitchens' work has received positive critical response in publications from Frieze to Art Review, The Times and The Financial Times.

Hitchens represents the fourth generation of artists in his family. His father (John Hitchens) and grandfather (Ivon Hitchens) are well-known British painters. Although proud of his artistic heritage, Simon breaks away from family tradition by working in 3D. Whereas earlier in his career, the stone medium would be skillfully worked and sculpted into altered forms, carved so as to look like they were machine-made, in his later work the artist lays bare natural rock-faces, exposing the unaltered raw surface texture of stone. He then takes clear resin casts of those surfaces, creating metophores for the human condition: two elements belonging together, moulded by each other’s presence and yet parted. Questions arise in the viewer's mind: are they looking at one, albeit divided, entity, or are there two individuals? Is this a coming together of a drifting apart? The exact fit of the two surfaces, if contact were made, suggests the possibility of a relationship that was once intimate and that could, perhaps, be so again.

Hitchens' sculptures are about presence and absence and have a serenity and beauty about them not often seen in the contemporary art world. He makes minimalist sculptures that belie the technical difficulty and drama of there making. "My forms are concerned with magnetism, presence, a solemnity of character and simplicity of shape."

Simon Hitchens


Publications

'Modern British Sculpture'
by Guy Portelli, 2004

'Thinking Big'
published by Sculpture at Goodwood, 2002

'The Art of Prior's School'
published by Bohun Gallery, 2002