We’re thrilled to announce that Simon Hitchens will present a monumental new work at Frieze Sculpture 2025, curated by Fatoş Üstek under the theme “In the Shadows.”
Running from 17 September to 2 November, 2025, the exhibition brings together works that engage with darkness in its many forms, from inner landscapes and cultural symbolism to the unseen and the ambiguous.
Hitchens will present Bearing Witness To Things Unseen, a new iteration of a 2022 work from his acclaimed Shadow series. Installed in the historic English Gardens, the monumental sculpture, created especially for Frieze Sculpture, stands like an irregular, polished black portal, a void carved from space and matter itself. Upright and human in scale, it possesses a strong anthropomorphic presence. As viewers approach, its western face reveals a deep, mirror-like polish that reflects their image within the silhouette of an absent rock’s shadow.
Circling the form, the viewer encounters its dense black surface, scored with finely incised parallel ridges that run its length, as if the material has been extruded through time. At the eastern end, the work opens into a rugged, cave-like void: the negative cast of a long-absent boulder, rendered with geological precision. This is the rock’s shadow, captured at the moment it was cast by the rising sun on the spring equinox, one of only two days each year when day and night are perfectly balanced.
The sculpture embodies a convergence of temporal scales, the deep time of geological formation, the celestial rhythm of equinoxes and the immediacy of human perception. It offers a meditation on presence and absence, transience and continuity, a reflection on the brief span of human life held against the enduring structures of the natural world.
