David Simpson  (American, 1928) 

David Simpson (American, b.1928) is an Abstract painter. Born in Pasadena, CA, he currently resides in Berkeley, CA, where he was a professor of art at the University of California, Berkeley. Simpson received a BFA from the California School of Fine Arts in San Francisco, CA, in 1956, and a MFA from San Francisco State College in San Francisco in 1958.

In 1958, he also had his first exhibit at the San Francisco Art Association Gallery. Working with acrylics on canvas, Simpson's work shows influences of early abstractionists such as Piet Mondrian (Dutch, 1872–1944) and Mark Rothko (Russian-American, 1903–1970). Though Abstractionism was replaced by Conceptualism and Performance Art, and then brought back into fashion by Postmodernism, Simpson has never wandered away from it. His most famous works include Four Square Pedro and Quatro Camino, and he is also well-known for his Vertical Series (1973).

Simpson’s work has been exhibited at solo shows in galleries such as the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Haines Gallery in San Francisco, CA, Galerie Lausberg in Düsseldorf, Germany, Studio la Città in Verona, Italy, Museum of Contemporary Art (MART) in Roverato, Italy, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, in Philadelphia, PA. He has also participated in group exhibitions and showings at Studio la Città, in Verona, Italy's 35th Anniversary Exhibit, An Inner Glow-Color as Painting, at the Kunstverein Lingen Kunsthalle in Lingen, Germany, and the Geometry and Flow exhibit at Seomi Gallery, in Seoul, Korea. Simpson has been published in Subtle Abstraction of David Simpson by Kenneth Baker for the San Francisco Chronicle, Bay Area Artist and His Modern Medici, Artists Who Take Abstraction to Ground Zero by David Bonetti for the San Francisco Examiner, California Art: 450 Years of Painting, and The Panza di Biumo Collection: Artists of the 80s and 90s. The artist’s work can also be found in public and private collections, such as IBM Corporation in San Jose, CA, and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation in Chicago, IL.