Michael Simpson: 101 Drawings

American Art Catalogues presents 101 Drawings: Selected Works 1974 - 2024, co-published by Modern Art & American Art Catalogues. The monograph reviews 101 selected drawings by British artist Michael Simpson.

“Throughout his career Simpson has destroyed many paintings, particularly works from the Bench Paintings and earlier series such as The Debris of the Fuck and The Burial of the Books. They were obliterated, painted over with new images, or, when the canvas became too laden with paint to be reworked any further, cut off the stretcher and scrapped. The only evidence of these lost works are the drawings, ghosts of ideas. Those drawings are now grave markers, tombstones to dead paintings to be grieved over, lamented. Others offer hope, they are seeds, buds, fledglings of paintings yet to be realised. The germination period from drawing to painting could be, as with the Leper Squints, thirty years or more, while others were made retrospectively.

The repetition of the images in the drawings is akin to an athlete practising a movement or a musician playing scales. Building muscle memory, embodying the idea, becoming immersed in its physicality. Trying a different tilt to the angle of a floating bench, a slightly narrower ladder, a darker shadow. Tweaking every element of the constituent parts of the image and how they can be combined. The drawings aren’t preparatory for the paintings to be scaled up from, they are questions, not solutions.”

– Excerpt from David Risley’s text, published in 101 Drawings: Selected Works 1974 - 2024

Specifications:

- Softcover with dustjacket

- 11 5/8 x 8 1/2 inches (29.5 x 21.5 cm)

- 224 pages, 101 illustrations

- Text by David Risley

- Edition of 300 copies

- Printed in United Kingdom