Simone Forti — Spritz3000

Simone Forti
(b. 1935) based in Los Angeles, California

Digital video, 18 min.
unlimited edition

Simone Forti’s Weeding: Steve and Lisa’s Garden 1 (2019) shows the artist tending the garden of her longtime friends and collaborators, Steve Paxton and Lisa Nelson, at Mad Brook Farm in East Charleston Vermont, where she in a cabin for over a decade. The video lingers on the quiet work of weeding, drawing parallels between caring for the land and caring for the body. Forti’s deliberate movements—such as sustained focus on pulling dandelions—merge labor and dance, revealing how physical attention, whether to soil or self, nurtures both ecological and embodied well-being and awareness.

Pen, pencil, marker on paper
14 1/2 × 11 1/2 × 1 3/4 in.

Simone Forti’s Tree Drawing: I Stand Where a Bear Stood Recently, Clawing This Tree (2010) is part of a larger body of bear drawings. In a short essay written in 2016 for The Brooklyn Rail, Forti reflects on becoming lost in the Vermont woods where she needed to create a nest of boughs under a tree settle through the night until daybreak. The experience, she recalls, sharpened her sense of vulnerability and connection to the animal world. For her, bears embody strength, instinct, and deep attunement to the land—qualities with which Forti has engaged for decades through movement. Standing where a bear had clawed a tree, she aligns her body with its trace, underscoring how humans and animals share a fragile, intertwined ecology.

Unpainted pine
120 × 9 × 5 in.

Saw Horse and Plank by Simone Forti, first presented in 1961 at Reuben Gallery in New York, emerged from her interest in everyday structures as catalysts for movement. Using a simple seesaw made from a plank balanced on a sawhorse, Forti invited participants to navigate shifting weight, balance, and gravity. For her, the seesaw became a choreographic partner, demanding responsive adjustments and attunement to others’ movements. Recreated in 2022 for The Box in Los Angeles, the work continues to embody her approach to improvisation, play, and the subtle negotiations that arise when bodies share space and equilibrium.

Unpainted pine
34 × 40 × 22 in.

Simone Forti (b. 1935, Florence, Italy) is a dancer, choreographer, and artist whose groundbreaking work since the early 1960s has profoundly influenced the fields of postmodern dance and visual art. Emerging in New York within the experimental circles of Judson Dance Theater, Forti developed her Dance Constructions—improvisational structures using simple materials and actions to explore gravity, balance, and human interaction. Over decades, her practice has expanded to include drawings, writings, and movement studies informed by her observations of animal motion, the natural world, and the intertwining of language and physicality. Forti’s work bridges art and life, proposing movement as a way of thinking and perceiving. She continues to perform, teach, and create, integrating deep physical awareness with poetic and ecological insight. Forti’s work is held in major museum collections and has been the subject of significant solo exhibitions, including Simone Forti at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2023), Thinking with the Body: A Retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich (2022), and presentations at The Box, Los Angeles (2022).