• I'M A BIG STAR

    KATE GROOBEY

    7 MAY – 30 MAY
  • You are the stars the moon all light You shine so bright by your side I never fear the night...

    You are

    the stars

    the moon

    all light

     

    You shine so bright

    by your side

    I never fear the night

     

    – Poem by Jina Khayyer, 2023

     

    Photo by Elfie Semotan

  • I'm A Big Star

    7 May – 30 May

    Sim Smith is delighted to present Kate Groobey’s latest exhibition with the gallery, I’m A Big Star. The exhibition explores emotions that cut across individual experience, like awe, success, joy, tenderness, adoration, and desire. Her work depicts the body, the primary site through which the world is felt and known. The recurring figure in Groobey’s paintings is her wife, but rather than functioning as recognisable portraits, they embody inner landscapes and shared emotional states.

     

    After several years working with more process-driven techniques, including dripping and pouring paint, Groobey’s latest oil paintings mark a return to the brush. This shift brings renewed emphasis to gesture and touch. The brush operates as an extension of her hand and arm — a tool to feel and think, and to map internal sensations onto the canvas.

     

    “I’m a big star says many different things to me. It says we are star-stuff, we are all made of star stuff, like Carl Sagan said in Cosmos, or stardust, like Joni Mitchell said in Woodstock.”

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  • “When I paint with brushes, I often stand on the canvas to feel a close connection between my body and the surface. Footmarks appear in older paintings, but in this series I allow all marks — from my foot, brush, drip, palette knife, or even an insect — if they work, I leave them. They become part of the mark-making language.” 

    — Groobey, 2026

  • Alongside the large oils, the exhibition presents a series of Groobey’s watercolours. Foundational to her practice, many begin as small note-to-self ink drawings and are later developed into watercolours, some of which are translated into oil paintings.

     

    The place in which Groobey paints has a decisive impact on her work. This series was made en plein air in the south of France, where many of her artistic heroes — Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, and Van Gogh — lived and worked. The energy of nature shapes the paintings, while motifs such as stars, moons, cherries, and water emerge across the series.

  • “It’s not about observing nature like the Impressionists. Its energy moves through me. Light, wind, heat, the movement of trees and grass shapes the rhythm of my brushstrokes, my colour, my bodily sensations as I paint. Sometimes it enters more directly, wind blows soil and leaves onto the canvas or raindrops land in the paint. If you look closer at 'I want to be the moon', you’ll find a very gentle early spring rain embedded in the surface.”

  • “Painting in nature is a wild feeling. Nature has this dancing energy — the grass, the clouds, everything’s in movement. And the brush almost feels like it’s painting on its own, it’s coming from your body much faster than you can think. That’s the exciting place to be, on the edge of thought, on the edge of yourself, in this kind of free state.”
  • “When we first met, Jina gave me a moon-bath. Before that, I hadn't really paid attention to the night sky. Afterwards the moon became almost like a friend that I would look for every day, and we would go for stargazing sessions at night looking for shooting stars.”
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