ROOMMATES: David Surman and Ian Gouldstone

Sibyl Gallery is beyond delighted to present ROOMMATES, an exhibition of work by UK-based artists David Surman and Ian Gouldstone.

David Surman has established an international reputation with his contemporary figurative works and exuberant gestural handling of recurring motifs including animals, birds and mythological figures, connecting abstract expressionism, pop and cartoon aesthetics.

In the works of Ian Gouldstone animation, printmaking, computer simulations and projection combine to create a hard-edged minimalism that could only exist now and yet also harkens back to the aesthetics of 1970s minimalism, process art, and computer art.

Categorically, these works appear polar opposites, and yet they share underlying concerns and express a view on our contemporary moment. The exhibition invites us to tune into other characteristics that seemingly disparate works might share, such as movement, atmosphere and tension. Surman and Gouldstone’s shared background in animation, film and videogame design provide clues to the aesthetics at play in these works. 

Surman and Gouldstone are also an artist couple, and present this show fully cognizant of the celebrations, disagreements and meanderings inherent to the history of artist couples presenting their work side by side. Art history is replete with examples of artists whose life together is framed as the struggle of one career against another, but for Gouldstone and Surman, the project is one of pure exploration, creating what they want according to their impulses. Sometimes collaborating, sometimes diverging, but nearly always drawing from a shared pool of interests such as animation, film, video games, the natural world, politics, and philosophy.

Both artists present an ever-changing surface that oscillates between extreme flatness and depth, characterised by instability and precarity. In both cases the image resists closure. We’re left fundamentally questioning the nature of the image that seems to remain in process or flux. These commonalities are at the heart of two distinct bodies of work, and arise from the near twenty year long dialogue between two artists who belong to a generation (alternately known as geriatric millennials or the sandwich generation) who experienced both the analogue and digital worlds, the pre and post-millennial media. 

The work is striking for its commentary on the present, whether through Surman’s figuration that alludes to disinhibited masculinity, or Gouldstone’s use of live digital simulations that point to the malleability of our perceptions. The artists argue that we need new categories without recourse to obvious separations such as abstraction and figuration. We are better served to think in terms such as stability and instability, safety and precarity, illusion and clarity in this world of toxic masculine personas, deepfakes, and algorithmic feeds. They want to ask, ‘Did you know there are different sized infinities?’ and ‘What do werewolves mean?’

In such a moment of uncertainty, the artists point to sources of stability and hope. For Gouldstone, the big questions of mathematics and the rigours of philosophy provide a lode star upon which a direction can be charted. For Surman, the accumulation of art history and popular culture offers a connection to collective human experience, an anchor with which to ride out the storms of the tumultuous present.

ABOUT DAVID SURMAN

David Surman is a British artist based in London. He has established an international reputation in contemporary art for his paintings exploring the conventions and boundaries of figuration. He has developed a contemporary language embracing and fusing gestural expression, a knowledge of art history and pop-cultural aesthetics such as cuteness. He is a graduate of the animation program at the Newport Film School (2002) and the postgraduate film studies program at Warwick University (2004). Recent solo exhibitions include 'After The Flood' Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery (2025), ‘Sleepless Moon’ Gallery THEO (2024) Seoul, ‘Portraits of a Wild Family’ Sens Gallery (2022) Hong Kong, ‘Fairy Painting’ Sim Smith (2021) London, and ‘Sirens’ (2019) also at Sim Smith. His work is held in several major public and private collections, including the UK Arts Council Collection, The McEvoy Foundation for the Arts, the Neumann Family Collection, the Hornik Collection, Colección ALKAR Arriola Zugaza and Colección Espinosa de los Monteros Sáinz de Vicuña.

ABOUT IAN GOULDSTONE

Ian Gouldstone is BAFTA winning artist and filmmaker whose work incorporates games, animation and new media. He has shown work and held events internationally at venues including the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, Chengdu Biennale, The Eden Project, Cornwall, The Australian Centre for the Moving Image, Ars Electronica Linz, The National Videogame Arcade, Nottingham, The Jozef Stefan Institute, Ljubljana, Sim Smith, London, and SLEEPCENTER, New York.

Ian is a founder of the Australian games collective Pachinko Pictures, a former member of the Computational Creativity Group at Goldsmiths, and also the Gesture and Narrative Language Group at the MIT Media Lab. He graduated from Harvard University with a degree in mathematics before studying animation at the Royal College of Art, and more recently completed his MFA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths. Based in southeast London, Ian Gouldstone is also a former trustee of Deptford X, London’s longest-running visual arts festival.