Greg ‘CRAOLA’ Simkins :: The Middle
KP PROJECTS Presents: Greg ‘CRAOLA’ Simkins :: The Middle
31 May 2025 – 21 Jun 2025
KP Projects is proud to present The Middle, an exhibition showcasing the work of acclaimed artist Greg 'CRAOLA' Simkins. Simkins is a renowned American painter whose work features vibrant, highly detailed paintings filled with imaginative characters and dreamlike scenes.
In Greg ‘CRAOLA’ Simkins' seventh solo exhibition with the gallery spanning 12 years, the artist opens the door to a world suspended between memory and invention. “The Middle” is a dream terrain where the surreal logic of childhood imagination meets the fragmented architecture of lived experience. This new collection of paintings and drawings continues to follow a cast of recurring characters and themes mid-journey, perched upon crumbling fragments of a once-whole world.
Simkins’ creatures—many of whom have appeared in previous works as trickster guides or avatars of transformation, appear once again, grounded and contemplative. Pandas materialize as jokesters or soothsayers alongside cunning invertebrates, mischievous rodents, and porcelain deer. Fish float impossibly out of water and into space. Birds perch on slabs of broken concrete walls etched with faded tags or vintage cartoon characters. In Simkin’s world, animals become hybrid knights, flora grows from flesh, and narrative logic warps in favor of something more magical, more subconscious. This is not mere fantasy, it is mythology built from asphalt and imagination, from cartoons, comics, black book sketches and bedtime stories.
In the lush ecosystems and fantastical landscape found in the largest show-title painting “The Middle,” the world seems interrupted, as if time paused between one transformation and the next. Graffiti-covered wall fragments litter the dreamscape, their peeling paint and calligraphic scripts bearing witness to the artist’s origins in the graffiti yards of Southern California. A red-caped hero atop a giant blue bird extends an offering of a singular shiny pearl. Birds of every kind appear as harbingers of freedom and hope. Broken walls are not just backdrops—they are memorials to the past, physical metaphors for the boundaries Simkins has broken through over the course of his career. “The Middle” as an exhibition is filled with dynamic dualities: the sacred and the scrawled, the wild and the weary, the infinite imagination of youth, and the clarity of maturity. This is the threshold Simkins explores—not a resolution, but a reckoning. A place where the characters and creatures from The Outside return not to escape, but to remember.
As Simkins explains, "The Middle" is a place of forgotten memories and stepping-stones layered in graffiti and vestiges from the past.” It is both biography and allegory, a personal archaeology rendered through a fantastical lens. The cracked walls and spectral markings serve not just as visual devices but as anchors—reminding us that even in the most unbound of worlds, history clings to the edges. In the artist’s visual mythology, there is a reckoning with the creative origins that shaped him. “The Middle” is where all of it converges: childhood wonder, street-born rebellion, painterly rigor, and mythic storytelling.