Weir, Simon
Weir, Simon
Bio Sketch
Simon Weir is an Australian painter, architect and scholar of surrealism: Senior Lecturer at the University of Sydney School of Architecture, Design and Planning, with a PhD in Architecture and particular expertise in Salvador Dalí and René Magritte. His scholarship examines the relations between surrealism, architecture, art and philosophy — including object-oriented readings of Dalí's "ontographic" project, establishing the antecedents for Dalí's theorization of surrealist objects in Cubism and Italian Metaphysical art ("ontographic art," read with Graham Harman's and Ian Bogost's object-oriented ontology). He serves on the editorial collective of the International Journal of Surrealism, is a member of the International Society for the Study of Surrealism, and in 2026 is Research Fellow at the Fundació Gala-Salvador Dalí, Figueres — the first edition of its Dalí Fellowship Programme. Alongside the scholarship he is a painter whose recurring egg motifs and "architectural uncanny" canvases run parallel to his research interests. Weir photographed Dalí's house at Port Lligat for the chapter ingested here (Figure 24.3, "Photograph by Simon Weir").
Key Works
- *Salvador Dalí's Interiors with Heraclitus' Concealment* (2018) — Chapter 24 of Marinic's The Interior Architecture Reader: Dalí's surrealist objects and the Oval Room read through Heraclitus's concealment via Savinio's irony.
- Ongoing scholarship on Dalí's ontological project (1928–1935) and "ontographic art" — Cubism and Italian Metaphysical art as the antecedents of Dalí's theorization of surrealist objects, analyzed with the ontography of Graham Harman's and Ian Bogost's object-oriented ontology (see his University of Sydney research profile and PhilPapers listing).
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- concealment — Heraclitus's "nature loves to hide" as Dalí's representational premise, built into objects and rooms.
- surrealist-object — the desire-driven object taxonomy and its edible decor.
- cannibalism-of-objects — the imperious hunger for the object world and its feigned abstinence.
- intrauterine-paradise — the egg as symbol; the Oval Room as its architecture.
- paranoiac-critical-method — method as "the generation of knowledge," its knowledge dissimulated.
- metaphysical-art — the de Chirico/Savinio school as surrealism's theoretical source.
Relevance to the Core Research
Weir's chapter brings surrealism into the wiki's interior-theory core from the side of the designed object and the inhabited room rather than the gallery. His Oval Room analysis is the wiki's first case of interiority deliberately produced by concealment — an interior whose entrance is "effectively imperceptible," whose enclosure is engineered across sight, posture, climate and sound, and whose desire is interiorized ("intrauterine paradise"). It connects the wiki's uncanny/surrealism cluster to the interiority cluster and to the truth-and-illusion debate (illusion deliberately maintained rather than revealed or destroyed), and it supplies the Psychoanalytic Interior research area with a non-clinical domestic case: a home designed as the built part of a psychic program — the counterpart, in desire, of Freud's Berggasse consulting room.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
