Simon Roberts

Simon Roberts (b.1974) is a contemporary photographer based in Brighton, UK. Widely recognised for his large-format, tableaux photographs of the British landscape, his practice also encompasses video, text and installation work, which together, interrogate our notions of what landscape is and how it is depicted, utilised, commodified and interpreted. His photographs are taken with great technical precision, using formal devices associated with the picturesque: perspectiv

Beachy Head, Seven Sisters Country Park, East Sussex, from Merrie Albion (2007-2017) © Simon Roberts

Landscape, for Roberts, is a contested, ambiguous space, shaped not only by material and environmental factors but by fantasy and politics, economics and history. His work reflects contemporary debates in art and cultural geography that understand the landscape as an active process of incremental change, whose representation must be subject to scrutiny.

Simon has exhibited widely and his photographs reside in major public and private collections, including the George Eastman House (USA), Deutsche Börse Art Collection (Germany) and the Victoria and Albert Museum (UK). In 2010 he was commissioned as the official British Election Artist by the House of Commons Works of Art Committee to produce a record of the General Election on behalf of the UK Parliamentary Art Collection, and in 2014 he represented Britain during the UK-Russia Year of Culture. He has been commissioned to make several large-scale public artworks and recognised with numerous awards including an Honorary Fellowship to the Royal Photographic Society, the Vic Odden Award and grants from Arts Council England and the John Kobal Foundation.

Roberts is the author of several critically acclaimed monographs including Motherland (Chris Boot, 2007), We English (Chris Boot, 2009) – voted as one of the best photography books of the decade – Pierdom (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2013) and Merrie Albion (Dewi Lewis Publishing, 2017), whilst his work has been profiled and published widely including in the New Yorker, Granta, National Geographic, ArtForum, Wallpaper, amongst others. He holds a BA Hons in Cultural Geography from The University of Sheffield and is a regular public speaker and visiting lecturer at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp. Outside of his own professional practice he is involved with several not for profit organisations having served as a trustee of Photoworks and currently working as an ambassador for FotoDocument and the Positive View Foundation.

Solo Exhibitions:
Château de Flamanville (Flamanville, France): Normandy – Nos Jours De Fêtes, 2021
The Container (Tokyo, Japan): Brexshit Machine, 2020
Pallant House Gallery (Chichester, UK): Inscapes, 2019
Format Festival (Derby, UK): The Brexit Lexicon, 2019
Flowers Gallery (New York, USA): Homeland, 2018
Brighton Photo Fringe (Brighton, UK): Between the Acts, 2019
Cortona on the Move (Cortona, Italy): Inizio, 2018
Museum of Contemporary Art (Hiroshima, Japan): Sight Sacralization: (Re)framing Switzerland, 2018
Zeitgeist Art Gallery (Nashville, USA): Public Performance, 2018
Flowers Gallery (London, UK): Merrie Albion – Landscape Studies of a Small Island, 2018
Visionarea (Rome, Italy): New Vedute – Alternative Postcards of Italy, 2017
Centre Photographique (Rouen, France): Impressions of Normandy, 2017
Robert Morat Galerie (Berlin, Germany): Public Performance, 2017