Simon Denny, artist: 'At art school I discovered I liked the managerial bit and meeting people'
Karen Wright meets the artist in his studio in Berlin's Wedding neighbourhood
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Your support makes all the difference.Simon Denny works in a studio in Berlin's Wedding neighbourhood. The information I receive in advance from the studio specifies how hard it is to find – through two courtyards and past a sign – but in the end I get there easily enough. It is also surprisingly empty. There is a small team working on laptops and another room where Denny is being photographed and where I will eventually speak to him, but few clues as to what his work is about.
Denny is a "hot" artist. He has just returned from his opening at PS1, the contemporary "trendy" part of the Museum of Modern Art in New York and is representing New Zealand in the forthcoming Venice Biennale. Born in 1982 in Auckland to parents who preferred reading and listening to music to sport, he remembers going to a "quite traditional" single-sex school. "At school I was, 'What am I going to do?' and at art school I felt right at home," he recalls. "When I went there I thought I would be a painter, but then I discovered quickly that I liked the managerial bit and meeting people and this kind of [collaborative] art."
After leaving art college he became a librarian, but before long he was head-hunted by a visiting curator and invited to come to Germany. He never went back to New Zealand, ending up studying in the prestigious Frankfurt Städelschule HFBK. He confesses that he did not learn German while there as most of the students were from overseas and there was no need.
Settling in Berlin seemed a natural next step. He met a new set of peers. "I was looking at artists who were reading science magazines not Artforum," he says. His work, involving collaborations with actors and scenario-building, is far removed from the traditional art school practice.
His project for the arrival halls at Marco Polo Airport in Venice will be, he tells me excitedly, the Biennale's biggest single project. "I contacted Arounder.com and commissioned them to re-photograph the Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana in Piazzetta San Marco in high resolution. You can see these beautiful images that you look at and that are fantastic; you are used to looking at them on the ceiling but they are on the floor."
The other part of the exhibition will be in the library and will relate to New Zealand. From the carefully couched clues that he allows himself to tell me, it will combine design and research. And if it is like Denny himself it will be likable, affable, presentable and obviously ambitious: geek made good.
'Secret Power' by Simon Denny at the 56th Venice Biennale, 9 May to 22 November (nzatvenice.com)
Denny's 'The Innovators Dilemma' is at PS1, New York, until 7 September, (momaps1.org/exhibitions/view/396)
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