30 May – 15 September
First Floor
Canadian artist Gregg Simpson’s exhibition entitled The Atlantean Years, 1970-1975, displays a group of paintings and collages that were made by the artist between 1970 and 1975, when he was influenced by a trip he made in 1971 to Europe and Northern Africa with a grant from the Canadian Counsel.
During this period of time Gregg Simpson was immersed studying different topics such as alchemy, mysticism, occultism and also mythology. He was particularly interested about the Atlantis legend, a legend that holds a deep similarity when compared with other stories such as the Garden of Eden, the Elysian Fields and the Garden of the Hesperides. Each one of these symbolic legends is about mankinds developing self-consciousness, and they all represent the main sources of western occult tradition.
Furthermore, Simpson’s paintings were created following the Surrealist Belgian painter Rene Magritte’s tradition of hand-painting collages. Magritte was also a very strong influence for Simpson from his juvenile years. The artist tries both in his collages and his paintings to achieve a minimalist simplicity that reaches a balance between magical and formal qualities.
The exhibition is completed with bibliographic and documental materials and the showing of a television documentary, A New Arcadia: The Art of Gregg Simpson (2003) which shows the evolution of his work from the neosurrealism of dream (fantasy) in the nineteen-seventies up to his more abstract work in recent years.
Gregg Simpson: was born in Ottawa (Canadá) in 1947, he studied with the painter from Chicago, Charles Stegman and continued his studies at the Vancouver School of Art and the British Columbia University.
Simpson has been producing a large amount of works since the mid-sixties. His works habe been exhibited in museums and galleries in Canada, the United States, Europe, Asia and South America.
His works have also been studied at the Sorbonne, the Université Rabelais of Tours, the Université of Rouen and at the Accademia Tiberina of Rome.
Simpson was part of the Canadian surrealist group Surrealism West Coast, a group who achieved international renown through two exhibitions: “Surrealism Unlimited: Conroy Maddox and Friends” at the Cambden Arts Centre, London (1978), and “Other Realities: The Legacy of Surrealism in Canadian Art” Canadian cultural centers in Paris and London (1979). In 1981, José Pierre included the West Coast group in a research paper entitled Surrealism in Canada and later he included works made by some of the Surrealists West Coast artists in his 1983 book L’Universe Surréaliste.
