David Simpson: Works 1965–2015

DAVID SIMPSON: Works 1965–2015 offers a comprehensive look at the California artist’s output over a fifty-year period. 

The late 1980s signaled a transition away from the “hard-edged,” abstract works which characterized Simpson’s early career. From contrasting bands of monochrome which hum with vibrant intensity, the artist turned to nebulous washes of interference paint. He has painted mostly monochromatic work that hovers in an almost alchemical realm.

Using interference paints, composed of titanium dioxide electronically coated with mica particles, Simpson creates nuanced, mercurial paintings on smooth and active surfaces. The particles of mica act as tiny mirrors, reflecting light back and forth in ever more complicated patterns. 

The results transcend the very notion of paintings, as they play with the medium of light itself to create the monochromatic shift of color.

David Simpson is a reductive painter who had been central to the Bay Area art scene since the 1950s. He received his BFA from the California School of Fine Arts (now SFAI) and MA from San Francisco State College (now SFSU). His diverse painting practice weaves together impulses of minimalism and hard-edge abstraction with those of the California Light and Space movement, to forge an entirely singular creative vision. Throughout his career, from early striped oil paintings that hint at atmospheric landscapes to his celebrated interference paintings that shimmer and alter in the light, depending on their angle of view, Simpson has maintained a boundless curiosity and desire to expand the limits of his chosen medium. 

In addition to solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Oakland Museum of Art, CA; and the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA, his work has been included in group exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States. Significant exhibitions include Fifty Californians, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (1962); Americans 1963, curated by Dorothy Miller, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (1963); Post Painterly Abstraction, curated by Clement Greenberg, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (1965); Art Across America, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (1965); and The West Coast Now, Portland Art Museum, OR (1968). 

He is represented in important public and private collections that include the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano, Switzerland; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Panza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland and Varese, Italy; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; and Seattle Museum of Art, WA.