BATH.- Michael Simpson (b. 1940) is one of Britain’s most well-known and respected contemporary painters, who has, for most of his career, lived and worked in Bradford-on-Avon, ten miles from the Holburne Museum.

Known for his large scale, pared-back paintings, Simpson’s primary concern is with ‘the mechanics of painting’. He says, ‘despite the subjective references in my work, I believe a painting must move beyond its subject and, for me, formal considerations are paramount’. This distinct artistic language produces expansive works that ask questions of the very nature of painting itself.

This exhibition, however, focuses on the intimate drawings that underpin Simpson’s painting practice. Across the last five decades, Simpson has produced thousands of drawings, most of which have never been seen outside his studio.

Drawing towards painting will bring together more than 70 of these intimate works on paper for the first time. Made in a range of different media on a variety of materials, these drawings reveal how Simpson’s ideas emerge and grow over time.

The exhibition will reflect Simpson’s career-long interest in the repetition of certain images, in particular the Leper Squint, the Confessional, and the Bench, each reflecting in their different ways, his impassioned belief in ‘the infamy of religious history’.

A leper squint was a feature built into the walls of medieval churches across Europe, allowing sufferers of leprosy and other ‘undesirables’ to view the altar while remaining outside and hidden from the congregation. The Confessional, an object of inherent power and impoverishment, is for Simpson ‘one of the lowest points of human culture’, and the Bench, the painter’s homage to the Neapolitan philosopher, Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) whose advanced ideas of cosmology caused him to be tortured and executed by the Catholic Church.

Holburne director, Chris Stephens, said: “We are so excited to be the first public institution to focus on Michael Simpson’s powerful and beautiful works on paper. They reveal his engagement with his chosen subjects with an intimacy quite distinct from his monumental paintings. It is so important for us at the Holburne to celebrate one of the greatest talents in our region.”

Michael Simpson (b.1940) lives and works in Wiltshire, UK. He studied at Bournemouth College of Art (1958-60) and Royal College of Art, London (1960-63). Simpson’s work is in numerous public collections including; Tate, UK; Arts Council England, UK; Arts Council of Northern Ireland, IE; Bristol Museum and Art Gallery, UK; British Council Collection, London, UK; David Roberts Arts Foundation, London, UK; The Ekard Collection, NL; Schumann Collection, Aachen, DE; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, DK; Stuyvesant Foundation, NL; Ulster Museum and Art Gallery, Belfast, IE; Start Museum, Shanghai, CN; Lim Collection, Hong Kong, HKG . Selected recent solo exhibitions include; Michael Simpson, Nosbaum Reding, Luxembourg (2021); New Paintings, Blain|Southern, London, UK (2019); Selected Paintings, Minsheng Art Museum, Shanghai, CN, (2018); Squint, Blain |Southern, Berlin , DE (2017); Flat Surface Painting, Spike Island, Bristol, UK (2016); Study #6, David Roberts Arts Foundation, London, UK (2014); Simpson is the recipient of several awards including the Arts Foundation Fellowship in Painting (2000) and the John Moores Painting Prize (2016) for his painting Squint 19. www.michael-simpson.co.uk

Michael Simpson will be in conversation with the artist Mark Wallinger at the Holburne Museum 8 June at 7pm.