Michael Simms– 'Soma' Exhibition Opening Celebration

Join us for the opening celebration of Soma, a solo exhibition by Michael Simms at Eloise Cato Gallery, Sydney Thursday 22 October 6–8pm.

RSVP is essential, please book through Humanitix. For further information or to register your interest in the pricelist please get in touch directly at info@catogallery.com or by calling +61 403 902 498. If you are unable to attend the opening, the exhibition will be on show from the 21 October – 14 November 2026 during gallery hours of 10:30 - 5pm Tuesday - Friday and 10:30 - 3pm Saturday or by appointment.

Soma places the figure under pressure. Against a culture of increasingly manipulated, filtered and generated bodies, Michael Simms’ paintings return to the complexity of lived embodiment, distinguishing the lived body from the body as image. In Simms’s classical training we find a structure, a universal translation sitting in comfortable collective familiarity. Yet in using his own body as both subject and material, Simms searches for extreme perspectives and internalised viewpoints that condition familiar anatomy as intangibly legible. Adopting unconventional gazes through mirrors, video work, movement performance and somatic experimentation to look through and across the figure in shifting states, he paints consciousness as shaped by our felt relationships. As bodies fold back upon themselves, turning towards contortion, Simms interrogates ideals through which the body is disciplined, scrutinised and held to normative expectations as a broader critique of the gaze through a queer lens. Examining how external structures of looking are internalised and policed from within. Simms’ surfaces are cut, scraped, glazed, obscured and rebuilt; edges emerge and dissolve; with the accumulated surface retaining a history of action, as a body carries the marks of stretch, scar, age. 

Michael Simms is an interdisciplinary artist working across painting, drawing, photography and performance, based on Gadigal Country, Sydney. Exhibiting extensively across Australia, he has been a finalist in the Archibald, Darling Portrait, Doug Moran, Callen and SBS Portrait Prizes, among others. His practice has also been recognised through residencies at the New York Academy of Art, Broken Hill Art Exchange, Bundanon Artist in Residence Program and Gang Gang Residency Program. Represented by Eloise Cato Gallery, Sydney, and Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne, Simms’ work is held in major public and private collections nationally and internationally, including Maitland Regional Art Gallery, The Elliott Eyes Collection and the Accenture (YSC) Collection, Sydney. He holds a Bachelor of Arts and Behavioural Science from Flinders University and was formally trained in classical drawing and painting at the Julian Ashton Art School in Sydney.