In 1995, Aldridge won the RIBA President's Medals Students Award in 1993. From 1995 to 1996 Aldridge worked on a building site on the construction of the No. 1 Court where he began developing artwork using construction materials, office photocopiers, and epson engineering plotters. In 1996 he was awarded a Kennedy Scholarship to study a Masters in Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. by Simon Aldridge Before graduating, Aldridge had in 1999 already taken a studio space in the Meatpacking District, Manhattan, in the same building as artist Matthew Barney. There, he began to make wall mounted sculptures out of construction materials and using industrial paint and printing techniques. These ‘Wallride’works were first exhibited in 2001 at Mark Pasek Gallery in the Lower East Side, where Aldridge met and began collaborating with Wes Lang and FAILE. Aldridge, Lang and Faile were all working with sampling and graffiti. Two books – ‘Orange’, and ‘Death’ were produced by FAILE and published as limited editions featuring work by Aldridge.
Work
In 2001 Aldridge was a World Views Artist-in-Residence at the World Trade Center where he had an art studio on the 91st Floor of Tower One together with Monika Bravo and 13 other artists. Aldridge shared his studio with Jamaican-American Michael Richards who died aged 38, in the World Trade Center in the September 11 attacks. After surviving the September 11 attacks Aldridge relocated his studio to the Brooklyn Navy Yard. In 2002 then New Museum curator Anne Ellegood included Aldridge in ‘The Meaning of Style’ which also featured Steve Ellis and Robert Stone, writing in the exhibition catalogue, "Simon Aldridge pushes conventional limitations of monochromatic painting and minimalist sculpture through forms that function as a hybrid of these media and are simultaneously imbued with content related to everyday street culture. His use of spray paint is seductive for its surprisingly variable surface texture while remaining, as the artist describes it, consistently 'atonal'. The painterly concerns of the medium are then meaningfully related to the subcultures of graphiti artists and even construction workers, who use these standardized materials on an ongoing basis." Aldridge's work was first shown with other post-conceptual artists Wade Guyton, Kelley Walker and Patrick Meagher in ‘Retrofit’ curated by Lauri Firstenberg at Lombard Freid Fine Arts, New York in 2002. Firstenberg was at the time the curator of Artists Space and described Aldridge's work - "Foregrounding architectural illusion, Aldridge produces a delicate balance between accident and intention, structure and agency, theoretical intervention and subjective aimlessness." At the close of 2002, Aldridge was included in Flash Art Magazine's survey of ‘Contemporary Painting Today’. In 2003 German art critic Daniel Marzona, author of Minimal Art, and curator at MoMA PS1 included Aldridge in ‘Framing Architecture’, an exhibition which also included Wade Guyton, Terence Gower, Patrick Meagher, and Anton Vidokle. Aldridge had his second solo show in New York at Cohan and Leslie in Chelsea in 2004.
In 2001, Aldridge was a World Views Artist-In-Residence at the World Trade Center in New York, and he was also the recipient of a Pollock-Krasner Grant from the Pollock-Krasner Foundation. In 2002 his design for the Pentagon Memorial was shortlisted and exhibited at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC.
RIBA – Bronze Medal for Part 1 Students – 1995
Kennedy Scholarship to Harvard University – 1996
World Views Artist-In-Residence at the World Trade Center – 2001
Pollock-Krasner Grant / Pollock-Krasner Foundation – 2001
Jury Selection, Pentagon Memorial Competition – 2002
Joel Sternfeld, Lynn Gumpert, Dale Jamieson and Chris Wiley, NYU Grey Art Gallery, Hall Art Foundation and Hirmer Publishers, Munich, 2018 Landscapes after Ruskin: Redefining the Sublime,
Moukhtar Kocache and Erin Shirreff, New York, 2004 Site Matters: The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council's World Trade Center Artist Residency 1997–2001,
