Michael Simpson (painter)

Michael Simpson (born 1940) is a British painter. Simpson has had major solo shows at the Serpentine (1985), the Arnolfini (1996), Spike Island (2016), BlainSouthern (2017) and Stuart Shave Modern Art (2024), and in 2016 won the John Moores Painting Prize for his painting Squint (19).

Career
Born in Dorset of Anglo-Russian parents, he attended Bournemouth College of Art (1958–60) and the Royal College of Art (1960–63). 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" (Louisiana Channel Documentary).

“I believe a painting must move beyond its subject and in my own work, formal considerations are paramount. I try to ‘build’ a painting, and by putting its elements together in a certain way, I hope to find those critical relationships which will give the object its brevity, its coherence. This challenging process, like an unpredictable marriage, between abstract principles and the subliminal forces of the subject, remain for me, the very essence of the practice.” – Michael Simpson, November 2023

He is represented by Stuart Shave Modern Art, London

He currently lives and works in Bradford on Avon, Wiltshire.

National collections

 * Tate (London, England)
 * Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (Copenhagen)
 * British Council (England)
 * Arts Council (England)
 * David Roberts Collection (London)
 * Ekard Collection (Netherlands)

Awards

 * John Moores (2016)
 * Winner of the London Arts Foundation Fellowship (1999)
 * John Moores 17 (1991)
 * Tolly Cobbald Open (1977)