Haines Gallery presents David Simpson: A Bit Beyond, a painting exhibition, at Fort Mason Center for Arts & Culture (FMCAC).

A Bit Beyond is on view at the Haines Gallery in Building C from May 2, 2025 through July 5, 2025, Tuesday through Saturday, 10:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. The opening celebration takes place on Thursday, May 22, 2025, 5:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m.

Born in Pasadena, CA in 1928 and based in Berkeley, CA, David Simpson has been central to the San Francisco Bay Area art scene since the 1950s. Over an extraordinary career spanning seven decades, he has developed a dynamic creative vision shaped by boundless creativity and a desire to expand the limits of painting.

A Bit Beyond brings together a selection of Simpson’s steely, burnished metallic canvases, alongside his celebrated Interference paintings. Made with interference pigments, which contain titanium-coated mica particles that refract and reflect light, these mercurial, seemingly monochromatic paintings shift in depth and color (sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically) in response to changes to lighting conditions and the viewer’s perspective. Their complex, active surfaces invite a participatory viewing experience, encouraging us to move around them and discover them at different angles, approaches, and times of day.

Simpson’s latest exhibition at Haines includes paintings created between the early 1990s to 2015, many on view in the Bay Area for the first time in more than a decade. Working from only six commercially available interference pigments, the artist masterfully conjures a seemingly limitless range of hues in works like “Little Gods of August,” which gleams with silver-green light, to “Royal Couple (2 of 2),” which morphs from gold to a deep, moody purple. Throughout the show, Simpson’s poetic titles offer up associative clues, while the works imbue sensual, optical experience with a profound sense of the sublime.

About The Artist
David Simpson (b. 1928, Pasadena, CA; lives and works Berkeley, CA) has been exhibited widely across Europe, Asia, and the U.S.; including solo exhibitions at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Oakland Museum of Art, CA; and Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach, CA. He is represented in important public and private collections that include the Baltimore Museum of Art; Berkeley Art Museum, CA; de Young Museum, San Francisco; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museo Cantonale d’Arte, Lugano, Switzerland; Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; The Panza Collection, Lugano, Switzerland and Varese, Italy; Philadelphia Museum of Art,; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; San Jose Museum of Art; and Seattle Art Museum. A monographic publication of his career, David Simpson: Works 1965 – 2015, was published by Radius Books in 2016.