Art - Art - Mediterranean original Simon Presley 1996 120x90
stretched on canvas.
Excerpt from a press report:
The legend returns
Simon Presley. He died in 2004, only 64 years old.
In 1966 he came to Hamburg after making stops in the United States and some Arab countries and in France. In Hamburg he also attended the art academy and began to paint at the end of the 60s.
Simon Presley painted abstract, naïve, surreal, women, rock & legends such as Jimmy Hendrix, Jim Morrison, Cobain and Bob Marley. Pictures of life, pictures of life. In oil, acrylic, watercolor, chalk – Simon Presley did not commit himself to a style or a form. His work is a reflection of his own life. Critical and adapted, mainstream and avant-garde, wide awake and dreamy; Simon Presley was irretrievably romantic, yet rebellious and stubborn. And it was full of ideas.
'Pop Art' is the order of the day, psychedelic, intoxication of colours and emotions – and Simon Presley is right in the middle of it. His pictures reflect the 70s with an intensity that is second to none.
Simon Presley was brilliant. As an entrepreneur and entertainer. Simon Presley is the inventor of the 'German Set' – in Dorotheenstraße he ran his 'Hair-In No. 1' – later 'Simon's Laden', his hairdressing salon, where the scene of Hamburg, Germany and the world shook hands. Sometimes he still haunts the press as a 'pop hairdresser', but he wanted to be nothing less than that. Simon Presley was his own Gesamtkunstwerk. He covered his 'duck' with the real, cut hair of his customers and drove around in his curly 'Deuxchevaux'. He cut hair perfectly, but he also anticipated something that is highly topical again today: the salon as a communication center. Here you could listen to and buy records, Simon Presley himself imported from England and the States. Here you could eat, drink and chat. Here there were vernissages, here he of course exhibited his own pictures. This is where the scene was made and experienced. Simon said what was announced. And he wandered through the discotheques, cut hair on site, he cultivated the scene.
