David Simpson
Flash Point, 1996
acrylic on canvas on board (interference paint)
6 x 6 inches
opening bid: $3,000
buy it now: $6,000
This piece from the mid 1990s epitomizes the artist’s practice from this fertile time in his career. In a conversation in 2016, Simpson noted: “I took inspiration from De Stijl, from the Russian avant-garde (their dynamics I liked), and Malevich’s Black Square, obviously. That seemed to me the single most characteristic thing in the art of the twentieth century—the square.”
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.
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.
Work courtesy of the artist and Charlotte Jackson Fine Arts, Santa Fe.
