David Simpson: A Bit Beyond
Upcoming exhibition
Overview
“Spending time with a David Simpson painting, one experiences shifts of light and color like that which happens when looking at the sky or ocean.”– Louis Grachos
Haines proudly presents David Simpson: A Bit Beyond, our 12th solo exhibition with the beloved Bay Area painter and abstractionist.
The Exhibition Reception will take place on Thursday, May 22, 2025 from 5:00 PM to 8:00 PM, during Fort Mason’s Summer Art Walk.
Born in Pasadena in 1928 and based in Berkeley, David Simpson has been central to the Bay Area art scene since the 1950s. Over an extraordinary career spanning seven decades, he has developed a dynamic creative vision shaped by boundless creativity and a desire to expand the limits of painting.
A Bit Beyond brings together a selection of Simpson’s steely, burnished metallic canvases, alongside his celebrated Interference paintings. Made with interference pigments, which contain titanium-coated mica particles that refract and reflect light, these mercurial, seemingly monochromatic paintings shift in depth and color (sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically) in response to changes to lighting conditions and the viewer’s perspective. Their complex, active surfaces invite a participatory viewing experience, encouraging us to move around them and discover them at different angles, approaches, and times of day.
Simpson’s latest exhibition at Haines includes paintings created between the early 1990s to 2015, many on view in the Bay Area for the first time in over a decade. Working from only six commercially available interference pigments, the artist masterfully conjures a seemingly limitless range of hues in works like Little Gods of August, which gleams with silver-green light, to Royal Couple (2 of 2), which morphs from gold to a deep, moody purple. Throughout the show, Simpson’s poetic titles offer up associative clues, while the works imbue sensual, optical experience with a profound sense of the sublime.
Selected Works
