ROBERT SIMPSON
NSW, Australia | Born 1955
Robert Simpson, born in New South Wales in 1955, is an Australian contemporary artist whose career has evolved from traditional landscape painting into an increasingly expressive and thought-provoking exploration of humanity's relationship with the natural world. Working across oil, acrylic and collage, Simpson has developed a distinctive visual language in which landscape, abstraction, symbolism and metaphor come together.
Simpson began his career as a realist landscape painter and has worked as a professional artist since the late 1970s. During his early years he devoted himself to painting the Australian landscape, developing considerable technical skill and a strong understanding of atmosphere, light and place. Fellow Australian landscape painter Warwick Fuller, who knew and painted with Simpson during this period, recalls his early commitment to landscape and the success he achieved with his traditional landscape paintings.
The mid-1980s marked an important turning point in Simpson's work. Increasing concern about human impact on the natural environment, together with his encounter with Desiderius Orban's book What Is Art All About?, encouraged him to reconsider what he wanted painting to communicate. Rather than simply depicting the landscape before him, he began searching for ways to express ideas about the environment, humanity and the increasingly altered landscape.
From this period onward, Simpson's paintings became increasingly abstracted and metaphorical. Recognisable objects and forms began appearing within landscapes that could be fragmented, veiled or reduced almost to traces.
These objects operate as symbols rather than straightforward subjects, inviting the viewer to consider what has happened — or may be happening — to the environment around them. Fuller describes this mature work as using recognisable objects as metaphor and symbol while maintaining Simpson's continuing examination of humanity's relationship with the natural world.
Despite this transformation, Simpson never completely abandoned the landscape tradition from which he emerged. His later paintings retain his sensitivity to atmosphere, colour and the physical character of the Australian environment, but increasingly balance these qualities against abstraction and conceptual ideas. The result is work that can initially appear beautiful or familiar, yet gradually reveals a more questioning and sometimes unsettling narrative.
The works represented by Plum Gallery provide an excellent illustration of this development. Stormy Weather Broken Head retains the recognisable Australian landscape and demonstrates Simpson's sensitivity to changing weather, coastline, light and atmosphere. In contrast, Prophets, Towards White, White Link and The Last Link move further into his symbolic and abstracted visual language, where landscape and recognisable forms become vehicles for broader ideas.
The repeated idea of the “link” in works such as White Link and The Last Link is particularly interesting when seen in the context of Simpson's continuing concern with relationships between people and the natural environment. Rather than prescribing a single interpretation, his later works encourage the viewer to look beyond the immediately visible image and consider the connections — and possible disconnections — between humanity and the landscape.
Simpson's work has been exhibited and collected in Australia and internationally, and his career demonstrates an unusual willingness to move away from an established and successful approach to landscape painting in order to pursue a more personal and challenging artistic language. His mature work combines the skills of the landscape painter with the ideas of an artist deeply concerned with the contemporary environment.
For Plum Gallery, this group of Robert Simpson works is particularly effective because it allows collectors to see both sides of his practice. Stormy Weather Broken Head provides a connection to his foundations as a landscape painter, while Prophets, Towards White, White Link and The Last Link reveal the increasingly symbolic and abstract language that came to define his mature work. Together they show an artist for whom landscape became not simply something to depict, but a means of exploring our changing relationship with the natural world.
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