MICHAEL SIMPSON
PAINTINGS
November 11, 2022 - January 29, 2023
GIANT presents Michael Simpson Paintings, an exhibition of a significant body of work including new and previously unseen Squint paintings. The exhibition presents several new works by the artist, created this year and previously unseen. In many of these, we see the use of a broadened palette, along with more austere architectural forms, where climbing aids are reduced to their most basic geometry.
Simpson’s works open up a set of conversations about light, space, composition, surface and colour. However, if we extend these ideas into the more abstract realms of balance, elegance, plausibility, belief and reason, we might imagine how each painting might become a metaphysical proposition. In Michael Simpson’s paintings, a ladder or platform is the only object besides the squint that it leads to, and this spareness of subject matter allows focus to rest on the formal elements of the painting. With the steps composed as if to challenge physical access, the squint remains a question – an inaccessible void rather than a tangible portal to a known quantity. Simpson resolutely keeps his viewers outside, staring at a flat surface – at what de Chirico might call the ‘tranquil and senseless beauty of matter.
“Throughout the 1930s a young Lithuanian woman Named Ada Kulikovskiy worked as a shop girl at Bobby’s department store, now transformed into GIANT. She was my mother, and it is to her that I dedicate this show with love and gratitude.”
Michael Simpson Paintings is in part a homecoming for the artist, who was born in Dorset and who studied first at Bournemouth College of Art (1958-60) before moving to the Royal College of Art in London (1960-63). Further still, Simpson’s own mother had worked at Bobby’s itself, the building in which GIANT Gallery is now sited.
Michael Simpson (b.1940 Dorset, UK) is an artist whose practice is characterised by a purposely restricted palette and distinctive, artistic vocabulary in which recurring motifs such as benches, squints and confessionals are explored in ongoing series of works. While on one level Simpson’s apparent subject is the infamy of religious history and the politics of belief, these subjective references provide only a subtext for his principal subject: the mechanics of painting.
Michael Simpson, Leper Squint Triptych, 2016. Photo by Peter Mallet.
