Gregg Simpson

Gregg Simpson, has been active since the mid-1960s. His work has been exhibited in museums and galleries in Canada, the U.S., France, Italy, Austria, Spain, Switzerland, Portugal, Malaysia, and is in over 100 private and public collections in Europe, Asia and North America, including the Lord Eastleigh Foundation,the Museo Granell in Santiago de Compostela, Spain and the Museu Vermhello in Estremoz, Portugal.

Since 1971, Simpson has spent much time traveling and exhibiting in Europe. In May 2000, his work was exhibited in Tuscany at the Fortezza di Montalcino, a 14th Century castle. This exhibition, entitled A New Arcadia, The Art of Gregg Simpson. is the subject of a Bravo TV documentary, which has been seen across Canada since 2003. It can be seen via: http://www.greggsimpson.com/pages/Videos.html

Simpson’s work has been written about and studied in several art journals, history books and academic studies at the Sorbonne in Paris, the Université Rabelais de Tours, Université de Rouen, France and at the Accademia Tiberina in Rome.

His work has been published and exhibited by three renowned Parisian art historians and writers, all colleagues of Surrealism’s founder, André Breton. José Pierre, included the artist in his landmark book, L’Univers Surréaliste, and in 1999, Sarane Alexandrian put Simpson’s work in his renowned periodical, Supériore Inconnu. Edouard Jaguer, founder of the Phases Movement in France, has collected and exhibited his works often in France, Portugal, the U.S. and the U.K.

In 2005, Simpson exhibited in the Maison des Artistes in the Château Grimaldi, Cagnes-sur-Mer, France; at and at the Fundacion Eugenio Granell in Santiago de Compostela, Spain. In 2008 and 2009 he contributed to five international surrealist exhibitions in France, Spain and Portugal.

Nicole Donnely, an independent curator in Mexico City wrote of his work:
“Shown widely across Europe, Simpson is part of the Surrealist and Lyric Abstraction movements. Referencing organic shapes, his oil and acrylic paintings on canvas and paper expertly utilize the single gesture to represent an entire form, delicately balancing soft effusions of colour against the frenetic energy of the mark. The resulting image possesses a surge of movement that suggests the unearthly, despite the hues which tie it inextricably to the terrestrial. Simpson’s paintings flux between the solid, rooted world and the ethereal.”

José Pierre wrote of the artist:
“Gregg Simpson is a man of contrasts and oppositions. One whole side of his personality is impregnated with hermetic tradition and oriental religions. With the medicine man, or fakir’s confidence, he knows how to add pyramids and clouds, geometry and the breeze, the palpable and the impalpable, the visible and the invisible. One who does not hesitate to speak of “Aztec Futurism” is well aware that the Rocky Mountains are but an extension of the Altai ranges and the Pamir plateau of afar.

But on the other hand, Gregg Simpson is also capable of diving at will into the primal forces and forms. With his loose, instinctive writing, which is a bit surprising in an artist capable of such spiritual discipline, he weds the quivering of the earth’s crust. Brother of volcanoes and earthquakes, he effortlessly relives the beginnings of the world. Before his eyes, everything is still liquid, water and fire, and of course, air, which is not totally surprising, earth also, I swear! Suddenly, something pierces the primordial hubbub. Is it the sun? Or some plasma-like God’s eye? No, it’s the eye of Gregg Simpson.”

From: In the Beginning, Paris, February 26, 1995
Translated by Professor Yves M. Larocque, Ottawa