Image: Ben Uri Gallery, London
Ben Uri has highlighted ‘Simon Black (1958-2008)’ in its Artist of the Week profile, presenting a concise account of the painter and engraver’s career and the collections that hold his work. The gallery’s newsletter entry places Black within the institution’s wider focus on Jewish, refugee and immigrant contributions to British visual culture, a remit also reflected in Ben Uri’s Research Unit and its online resources.
According to the profile, Black was born into a Jewish family in Prestwich, Greater Manchester, on 17 March 1958. He studied Fine Art and Printmaking at Manchester, Wolverhampton in 1981, and Rochdale in 1985, and left with a scholarship to the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. The profile identifies etchings, watercolours and oils as central to his practice, noting that he later produced large canvases in London.
The newsletter places Black among artists whose work is preserved in significant UK collections. Ben Uri states that his work is held in the Ben Uri Collection, while the profile also names the Royal Free Hospital and the Ruth Borchard Collection. The hospital commission is singled out as a major professional milestone: in 2001, Black won the Royal Free Art Project competition and was commissioned to paint six scenes of hospital life that are now displayed in the Royal Free Hospital’s atrium.
Ben Uri’s own context helps frame the profile. The Research Unit page describes the organisation’s aim as centralising research on the Jewish, refugee and immigrant contribution to British visual culture since 1900. It also says the database includes more than 3,000 profiles of contributors from more than 100 countries of birth, and notes that the Research Unit extends the work of the gallery’s collections and curatorial teams. Black’s inclusion in that framework underlines the gallery’s role not only as a collector but also as a research institution documenting artists whose biographies and careers intersect with migration, identity and British art history.
The profile also records the broad shape of Black’s later career. After moving to London in 1986, he began to work in oils and produced large-scale canvases in his trademark style. His works were featured in solo and group exhibitions, though the newsletter does not list those shows by name. It says that in 2007 he was diagnosed with cancer and died a year later, in London, on 3 March 2008.
The newsletter entry is accompanied by an image captioned ‘Simon Black, Damascus Gate Coffee Shop, 1985’, and Ben Uri directs readers to learn more about Simon Black and hundreds of other artists through the Ben Uri Collection. The profile sits alongside the gallery’s regular weekly content, but its main focus remains Black’s trajectory from his early printmaking studies to the London paintings now represented in collections including Ben Uri’s.
