The Hiking Club
New Museum Los Gatos: October 13, 2023 – February 4, 2023
Through evocative drawings, etchings, and paintings, Linda Simmel explores personal and cultural connections between landscape, memory, and history. The Hiking Club: A Vocabulary of Yearning intertwines the story of being the daughter of an immigrant, with the sublime in nature. The works in the show are in part homage to landscape, trees, and the histories they’ve lived through, as well as Linda’s immigrant father and the time in which he lived. For the artist, the work reveals the process of unraveling the burden of history that defines her, which ultimately presents a sensitive inquiry into intergenerational cultural identity, loss, and renewal.
Linda’s father John rambled the woods outside of Berlin and greater Germany with his hiking club. Walking together they took strides towards self-knowledge and formulated world views, while experiencing the forest’s sensuous environment. The trees among which he and his friends hiked, were witness to their discussions about the possibilities of a new social order under the Weimar Republic. As we know that progressive state did not last when Hitler came into power in Germany.
As a result, John had an intense idealism and a large loss, a romantic pull as well as a dark experience. Inherent in an immigrant story is the “if only” question and its subsequent residue of longing. What if fascism and anti-Semitism did not overcome Germany, what would the story have looked like then? Common to survivors of traumatic events, the Simmel family fell into the phenomenon of silence.
It was among trees that the psychic tone of John’s life was formulated. The forests provided the physical cauldron in which he developed his philosophy of life. Likewise, Linda moves forward into that cauldron of the natural world to connect with the sensory experience among landscape and trees; walking there to meditate on the weight of a history muted by unspoken stories.
Find more details about the exhibition on the New Museum Los Gatos website.
Linda Simmel’s paintings, drawings, and historically based etchings explore the influence of history on a psyche and subsequent feelings of longing that arise from the immigrant experience. Simmel received her BFA from the University of California at Berkeley and was represented by Takada Gallery. She spent a decade traveling to and showing in and around Berlin, becoming an international participant in the newly formed artist collective “Atelierhaus Panzerhalle e.V”, which was set in a tank repair workshop and ruinous surrounding barracks of a military base in the forests of Potsdam, Germany. In 2012 Simmel was an artist resident at the Baer Art Center in Iceland; in 2013 an artist at the Djerassi Resident Artists Program in Woodside, California; and she has been an artist in residence at the Kala Art Institute in Berkeley, California since 2007. Simmel’s work is included in the permanent collections of the Achenbach Foundation for Graphic Arts, Fine Art Museums of San Francisco, California; the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California; Saint Mary’s College Museum of Art, Moraga, California; and the Triton Museum of Art, Santa Clara, California. Born in Los Angeles, Linda Simmel currently lives and works in Sonoma, California.
