Drew Simpson

Over the last several decades, artist Drew Simpson has been honing his craft and mining the iconography of diseased aristocracies. Simpson is an individualist whose heroes — mountain men, glam metal musicians, fallen celebrities and abominable snowmen — are renegades that have carved their own paths despite adversity. In the Drew Simpson universe, recurring figures and symbols — hockey masks, tribal tattoos, prosthetic limbs, the early pioneers, and other totems of the harsh North American landscape — serve as emblems in one way or another for freedom. His juxtaposing and often dream like paintings nod to carefully studied artists such as Baechler, Twombly, Baselitz and Basquiat. The Great White North weighs heavy in Simpson’s mind, a symbol of the frontier where ‘new territory’ represents the chance to reinvent oneself. Notions of reinvention, reflection and healing resonate deeply with Simpson, as a disabled artist struggling with progressive diseases he frequently injects positive affirmation scripture throughout his work, revealing a central ethos that underlies the artist’s complex iconography: the strong belief that the reward of suffering is experience. The repetition of images and phrases become ritualistic and operate like...

Diploma from the Ontario College of Art & Design as well as a graduate from the Toronto School of Art.

Art Cologne, ARCO Madrid, DC Dusseldorf Contemporary, FIAC Paris, Art Miami, Art Chicago, Berliner Liste, Art Toronto, Slick Paris, Scope Miami, Scope Basel, Scope New York, Scope London, Scope Hamptons