Michael Simpson (painter)


Michael Simpson is a British painter. Simpson has had major solo shows at the Serpentine, the Arnolfini, Spike Island, and BlainSouthern, and in 2016 won the John Moores Painting Prize for his painting Squint .

Career

Born in Dorset of Anglo-Russian parents, he attended Bournemouth College of Art and the Royal College of Art. Simpson makes large scale paintings in ongoing series. These often repeat and rework a number of subjects and elements. Simpson's influences includes early Flemish painting, and his painting style incorporates minimalism and other types of formal restraints. He describes his approach to painting as a "deceptive force of the constructed image."
In Vitamin P3, a guide to contemporary painting, critic Barry Schwabsky described Simpson’s ‘allegiance to a conception more readily associated with abstraction than with painting that employs images’. He goes on to describe the artist’s preoccupation with “the idea that painting is not a kind of imaginary opening in the wall through which we get an illusory view of another world, but rather a physical thing that is made, whose flat surface confronts the viewer with a presence that demands engagement.”
Simpson has served as lecturer in several British Art Schools and Universities, and has been featured in various documentaries including "Odyssey of a Painter". He currently lives and works in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire.

National collections