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Artwork by David Simpson
Essays by Louis Grachos and Jonathon KeatsHardcover
12 x 11 inches
176 pages / 120 color illustrationsTrade ISBN: 9781934435540
Signed copies no longer available. -
David Simpson is a reductive painter who had been central to the Bay Area art scene since the 1950s. He received his BFA from the California School of Fine Arts (now SFAI) and MA from San Francisco State College (now SFSU). His diverse painting practice weaves together impulses of minimalism and hard-edge abstraction with those of the California Light and Space movement, to forge an entirely singular creative vision. Throughout his career, from early striped oil paintings that hint at atmospheric landscapes to his celebrated interference paintings that shimmer and alter in the light, depending on their angle of view, Simpson has maintained a boundless curiosity and desire to expand the limits of his chosen medium.
In addition to solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Oakland Museum of Art, CA; and the Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA, his work has been included in group exhibitions throughout Europe, Asia, and the United States. Significant exhibitions include Fifty Californians, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY (1962); Americans 1963, curated by Dorothy Miller, Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY (1963); Post Painterly Abstraction, curated by Clement Greenberg, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA (1965); Art Across America, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA (1965); and The West Coast Now, Portland Art Museum, OR (1968).
He is represented in important public and private collections that include the Baltimore Museum of Art, MD; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; M.H. de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Johnson Museum of Art at Cornell University, Ithaca, NY; Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA; Museo Cantonale d'Arte, Lugano, Switzerland; Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Panza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland and Varese, Italy; Philadelphia Museum of Art, PA; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; San Jose Museum of Art, CA; and Seattle Museum of Art, WA.
I always say [the art is] active even when there’s no sound in the room; they are affecting the subtlest of sounds in the space—dampening and absorbing even the human voice.
— Jennie C. Jones
A Free and Shifting Tonal Center is Jennie C. Jones’s first monograph, exploring her interdisciplinary practice that moves viewers through both visual and auditory engagement. Aurally altering the spaces in which her paintings, sculptures, and installations are on view, Jones’s work encourages viewers to anticipate sound even in the quietest of environments.
Conceptually, Jones’s practice reflects on the legacies of modernism and minimalism while underscoring the connection between minimalism and music, illuminating the influence of the Black avant-garde. Bringing this multi-sensory experience to book form, A Free and Shifting Tonal Center unites documentation of recent exhibitions—including Dynamics, her expansive show at the Guggenheim Museum (2022)—with excerpts of text, poetry, and conversations to create a “score” that reveals the layers of Jones’s artwork. Part artist’s book and part primer, this lyrical volume unfolds in movements, like a printed and bound evening of poetry, prose, and music.