“. . . instil a sense of pressure and intimacy.”
“With this new series bodies are no longer contained neatly within the ‘safe zone’ of the composition: they’re resisting the rigidity of classical ideals,” Michael Simms tells me about Body Talk. “The forms are pushed to the canvas edges, using tension and negative space as a device to instil a sense of pressure and intimacy.”
Exploring the kinaesthetic potential of the human body, Body Talk draws on recent research into movement-based performance practices, using automatic drawing and open mark-making to capture physical expressions of the body in motion.
“It really started with a creative collaboration with Kirk Page, who’s a Mununjali movement practitioner/actor and close friend and confidant.” Page introduced Simms to somatic practices, while Simms shared drawing techniques – a collaboration that has marked a “more physical, more embodied” shift in Simms’ painting.
Through Kirk, Simms met Victoria Hunt, a queer indigenous-Maori performance artist whose workshops at Critical Path opened his thinking even further. “One exercise in particular – moving one millimetre per second – changed how I perceive the body,” Simms says. Moving this slowly . . . revealed to him were “unexpected forms and emotional textures” that became a pathway to a “new artistic language.”
Michael Simms, Breath, 2025, oil on canvas, 70 × 90cm. Courtesy the artist and Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne
When we spoke, around fifteen new works were expected in the show – the artist feeling the “series expanding and contracting, almost like held breaths to be expelled . . .” The body of work and the artist, seemingly, enjoying the pulse of a practice in transformation – “I’ve found a fresh rhythm as an artist and that is energising.”
Here is also a practice weighted in a profound, cross-time understanding of male bodily representation and embodiment, Simms setting out for me a rich corpus of inspiration, from the likes of Thomas Eakins, Jenny Saville and Odd Nerdrum – “their daring reframing of how we view the body hits me on both an emotional and technical level” – through to films like Moonlight by Barry Jenkins, The Power of the Dog by Jane Campion and Femme by Sam H Freeman and Ng Choon Ping.
“I’m interested in how the nude male body has been historically made acceptable to Western audiences through the lens of European classicism,” Simms says. “I trained in academic life drawing myself, and as a result I’ve internalised many of these classical conventions. But as a queer person, I’m drawn to how queer and feminist thought challenge these paradigms. The ‘queer gaze’ disrupts and reimagines how we see, receive and feel bodies.”
Michael Simms, Substance 2025, oil on canvas, 26 × 56cm. Courtesy the artist and Flinders Lane Gallery, Melbourne
Simms says he has been “moved” by practices that reframe the body. Eakins’ The Swimming Hole, 1884–85, hummed “quietly with homoeroticism”; decades later Robert Mapplethorpe gave us works “made for and through a gay lens”; and today, Cassils, Ron Athey and Rafa Esparza “use their bodies to confront dominant narratives through deeply political and visceral performances.”
Speaking as someone who has also used Eakins in his practice, I see echoes across the corpus here, but also a vital contemporary quality that makes the works not only relevant in the present moment – right down to the title’s nod to the wonderful electropop queer icon Robyn – but important, too. “I’m letting go of needing everything to look ‘polished’,” Simms says, “you can see my hand in the brushwork and mark-making. There’s a physicality to it.”
Simms’ positionality, his physicality, brings much to the vitality of these works – it rubs you; the artist seeing it as an opportunity to “reclaim and re-sensualise” his own body. The resulting paintings are, in the artist’s words: “gentle awakenings: gestures that unsettle the classical gaze and invite intimacy and openness.” It’s an in-between space, “some figures echo Greco-Roman stillness, while others fold, collapse, or reveal vulnerability.”
Dr Joseph Brennan is a Lambda Literary Award-nominated author based in Tropical North Queensland.
Flinders Lane Gallery
17 June to 5 July 2025
Melbourne
Originally published in print – Art Almanac, June 2025 issue, pp. 24–26
