SIMON WEIR
Simon Weir is an Australian painter and scholar whose work brings architecture, landscape, objects and memory into precise but improbable relationships.
His paintings present lucid worlds in which familiar things behave strangely without losing their material conviction. Buildings become containers, stages or memories; landscapes hold objects that seem simultaneously to belong and not belong; images appear within other images; and recurring forms such as eggs create thresholds between different places, scales and realities. The paintings are carefully constructed, but their logic is not always fully explicable. They aim for the peculiar moment when an unfamiliar image nevertheless feels convincing, necessary or already known.
Weir is interested in the interval between perception and interpretation: the point at which something can be recognised before it can be explained. His work uses the precision and illusionistic power of painting to give imagined events the presence of observed reality.
Surrealism is an important lineage within this practice, but not a stylistic category. Weir approaches it as an ongoing method for discovering images, testing relationships between things, and allowing thought to emerge through visual experience rather than precede it.
Alongside his studio practice, Weir researches the history and theory of Surrealism, with particular expertise in Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. His scholarship examines relationships between images, objects, perception, architecture and thought. In 2026 he is based in Figueres, Spain, as a Research Fellow at the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí.
He is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, serves on the editorial collective of the International Journal of Surrealism, and is a member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism. He has presented public lectures on Surrealism and modern art for the Art Gallery of New South Wales and other cultural institutions.
Contacts
email@simonweir.net
SIMON WEIR :
artist, designer, writer, speaker.