GREGG SIMPSON / NORTH VANCOUVER BC CANADA - ISSUE 4 / July 2006

Website

Waterwall

Behind the Waterfall #1

I began my professional career in the late 1960's, exhibiting in solo and group shows at private, University, and other public galleries. I was also one of the founders of the pioneering multi-media art spaces in Vancouver such as the Sound Gallery and Intermedia., working in collage, film, multi-media, performance art and music.

During the early 1970's, I became increasingly interested in the subjects of alchemy, mythology and Symbolism. In 1971, supported by a Canada Council grant and a letter of introduction from William Rubin of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I traveled to London and Paris, to organize the first group exhibition of west coast Canadian art to tour Europe.

Alchemy

Transformation

Dream Machine

Meditations on Modernism 3

This exhibition, entitled Canadian West Coast Hermetics, The Metaphyisical Landscape, co-curated with the late Alvin Balkind of the UBC Fine Arts Gallery, was seen in Paris in 1973, by the French art historian and writer José Pierre, a member of the post-War Surrealist Group and a colleague of André Breton. He included my work in his landmark book, L'Univers Surréaliste (Editions Somogy, Paris,1983).

My work continues to be published and exhibited internationally alongside the leading historical figures of Surrealism and lyric abstraction, often with the Phases Movement in Paris, whose organizer, Edouard Jaguer, also collects my work.Another noted historian of the Surrealist Movement, Sarane Alexandrian, published a work from 1975 in Superiore Inconnu, the journal he began in 1947 with André Breton. My work has also been written about in Surrealism in English Canada, a Ph D Thesis by Yves M. Larocque presented at the Sorbonne in Paris in 1996. In 2005 I helped organize the exhibition West Coast Surreal, A Canadian Perspective, for the Museo Granell in Santiago de Compostela, Spain.

Ball Players

Blue Caverns

Discovery of Honey

Night Moves

In 2001, my solo exhibition, A New Arcadia, toured Europe, and was the basis for a television doumentary of the same name, shown nationally in Canada since 2003. It also was the subject of a treatise by Professor Antonio Malmo of the Accademia Tiberina in Rome. Various works also appeared in other Italian publications: including Dizionario Antologico e Critico Di Poeti, scrittori e artisti italiani contemporanei (1997) and Il Volo Di Icaro Utopia, tra sogno e realta quotidiana (Edizioni Tigullio-Bacherontius, Torino, 1998) and in Terzoochio, Bologna (1979 and 1985).

My work has been written about in such publications as Vie Des Arts (Montreal), Vanguard Magazine (Vancouver), artmagazine (Toronto), International Artist (Sydney, Australia) and Terzoocchio (Bologna, Italy). Several pieces have been collected by public galleries and universities, and represented in corporate and private collections in Canada, the U.S., Europe, Asia and South America. I currently have studios on Bowen Island, B.C. and in North Vancouver, where I rent my work to the film and television industry. I spend part of every year painting and exhibiting in Europe.