About

Biography

Philip Simonaro is a New York-based contemporary artist whose practice is rooted in lived experience, memory, and emotional perception. Working primarily in painting, Simonaro approaches the canvas instinctively, building a visual language through abstraction, figuration, handwritten text, recurring symbols, and raw mark-making. His paintings function less as literal records of events than as evidence of how those experiences were felt and remembered.

Simonaro began making art as a teenager in New York, initially drawn to spray paint and the immediacy of working outside traditional artistic conventions. He later studied glassblowing at Snow Farm in Massachusetts and at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia before returning his focus to painting. These experiences helped establish an approach that values experimentation, physicality, imperfection, and intuition over rigid technique.

Travel has become an increasingly important part of Simonaro’s practice. Experiences throughout London, Munich, Palermo, Australia, and elsewhere have exposed him to different landscapes, architecture, nightlife, people, and visual cultures that continue to enter his work indirectly. Rather than documenting the places he visits, Simonaro absorbs their atmosphere and allows those experiences to reappear through color, gesture, imagery, and memory.

His earlier paintings often carry the intensity of nightlife and urban experience—dense compositions populated by fragmented language, humor, symbols, figures, and moments of darkness and absurdity. More recently, his practice has begun to shift. Living and working in Montauk, New York, Simonaro has found inspiration in a quieter, more nautical environment shaped by open water, changing light, weather, and the rhythms of the Atlantic. This contrast between past intensity and present stillness has opened a new direction in his work.

Simonaro was selected for the Heckscher Museum of Art’s Long Island’s Best exhibition in 2016. In 2022, he presented his first solo exhibition, One Night Stand, in Oceanside, New York, followed by Send Back My Love in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2023. In 2026, Simonaro was named a finalist in Johnny Depp’s The People’s Artist competition, presented in association with Artforum. He is currently developing a new body of paintings for a future exhibition.

Artist Statement

My work is built from experience. I paint from the places I’ve been, the people I’ve known, the relationships I’ve had, and the emotions that remain after those moments have passed. Love, intimacy, distance, desire, loss, and connection have all shaped the way I make work. Rather than documenting these experiences literally, I use painting as a way of translating what they felt like.

I want the viewer to be able to live vicariously through my experiences without needing to know the entire story behind them. A painting might begin with something deeply personal, but once it leaves my hands, it becomes open to someone else’s memories and interpretation. A gesture, a figure, a handwritten phrase, or a recurring symbol may mean something specific to me while triggering an entirely different association for someone looking at it. That space between my experience and the viewer’s is important to the work.

I rarely begin a painting with a set plan. I don’t want to know exactly what the finished piece will look like before I make it. Instead, I allow emotion and instinct to determine what happens next. I build, erase, cover, write, scrape, distort, and respond to what is happening on the surface. Sometimes an image appears unexpectedly; sometimes something I thought would be important disappears completely beneath another layer. I try not to fight those changes.

For me, painting is less about illustrating an idea than allowing an experience to reveal itself. The imperfections, contradictions, and impulsive decisions are part of that process. They preserve the emotional state in which the work was made.

Relationships have been especially important to this practice. The people we love change the way we remember places, periods of our lives, and even ourselves. Some relationships stay with us; others exist intensely for a short period and then disappear. Either way, they leave evidence behind. My paintings are interested in that evidence—the fragments of people, conversations, environments, and emotions that continue to live inside us long after the original moment is gone.

Ultimately, I want the work to feel lived rather than constructed. Each painting becomes a record of an emotional experience, but also an invitation. You don’t have to have lived my life to enter the work. I want you to step into it, recognize something of yourself within it, and, for a moment, experience the world through mine.