California-born abstract painter David Simpson uses meticulous arrangements of color and form to elevate his meditatively abstract compositions. Simpson has said “I want my paintings to create space: to find room. I want them to create space without taking it, and to be contemplative in the process. Hence their apparent simplicity and openness.”

His stripe paintings were included in critic Clement Greenberg’s Los Angeles County Museum of Art exhibition, “Post Painterly Abstraction,” along with work by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Ellsworth Kelly. Critic Kenneth Baker, speaking of a recent exhibition of David Simpson works in San Francisco, noted that “Simpson’s uncompromising abstractions may look almost as radical today as when he made them [in the 1970s.] He invites us to enjoy the materials of illusionism and its invitation of fantasy, without forgetting ourselves.”

For years, David Simpson was on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley. He was amongst fifteen artists exhibited at the MOMA in 1963 in one of Dorothy Miller’s last exhibitions entitled “Americans”. His work is included in major museums throughout the world including the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC; Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, Chicago, Il; National Collection of Fine Arts, Washington, DC; Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC; the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

David Simpson
(b.1928)
Compression Towards the Stripe, 1958
Oil on canvas
36 x 16 inches

Signed and dated lower right