ABOUT THE ARTIST

Born in Ottawa in 1947, Gregg Simpson’s work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Canada, the U.S., France, England, Italy, Austria, Switzerland, Spain, Portugal, Malaysia, and South America. His works are included in over 100 private and public international collections.

Simpson works in the tradition of abstract surrealism, producing large canvases, drawings, mixed media and photography. He also does landscapes and figurative works.

His May, 2000 exhibition in a castle in Tuscany was the subject of a television documentary, broadcast across Canada in 2003, entitled A New Arcadia, The Art of Gregg Simpson, which can be seen at www.greggsimpson.com/Videos.

In the summer of 2012 an exhibition of works from the early 1970’s was shown at a museum in Estremoz, Portugal and then toured to the Museo Regionale in Beja, Portugal, finishing in September 2013 at the Fundacion-Museo Granell in Santiago de Compostela, Spain, where his work is now in a first rate collection which includes Picasso, Miro, Ernst, Duchamp and many other top names.

 

STATEMENT ON PROCESS

“My work involved an evolution through aspects of surrealism and abstraction. I began in the 60s as a hard-edge, Pop-influenced painter, who also did collages, drawings and multi-media.

In the 1970’s I developed neo-surrealist style, which eventually worked its way to a form of lyric abstraction.

My work is on the border between abstraction and surrealism, between formal design and automatist gesture.

A painting may evolve from shapes and forms into a lyrical, atmospheric work, or into one where a structure or contour suggests the figure, the landscape, or even still life, but transformed into a purely imaginative realm, a personal, yet universal, world of forms, the meaning of which changes with each viewer.

I continue to emphasize the importance of mark making and automatist improvisation because the physical act is always necessary to create art.”

http://greggsimpson.com