Lorna Simpson. Third Person

The solo exhibition of Lorna Simpson represents the most significant presentation of her work in Europe in more than a decade, focusing on her painting practice. Organized in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York – where an initial version curated by Lauren Rosati, “Source Notes”, was presented in spring 2025 – the Venetian iteration offers a renewed selection and brings together around fifty works – paintings, as well as collages, sculptures, installations, and film – drawn from the Pinault Collection, private collections, international institutions, and from the artist’s own archive. The exhibition will feature new works created specifically for the exhibition at Punta della Dogana. The exhibition is curated by Emma Lavigne, General Director and General Curator of the Pinault Collection, in close collaboration with the artist. The Venetian exhibition offers a renewed and expanded selection conceived specifically for the spaces of Punta della Dogana, through which the artist weaves the narrative threads that give shape to the fictional worlds and stories suggested by her work. Since gaining recognition in the mid-1980s for her groundbreaking approach to conceptual photography, Lorna Simpson (born in 1960, United States) has consistently and critically examined the mechanisms through which images are constructed. Since the mid-2010s, painting has become a particularly fertile ground for her artistic exploration, extending the core concerns that run through her practice: the erosion and resurgence of memory, the failures of representation, and the instability of narratives. The exhibition brings together significant groups of works from her most emblematic series of this period, including Ice, Special Characters, and Earth and Sky. It spans over twenty years of Simpson’s practice, including a number of paintings created for her participation in the 2015 Venice Biennale, curated by Okwui Enwezor, to the debut of several new works made specifically for this exhibition. Defying any singular interpretation, Simpson’s paintings draw viewers into uncertain zones at the edges of the visible. The exhibition unfolds around three major ensembles. It opens with a first group of dense compositions, populated by enigmatic figures, historical echoes, and political tensions, evoking uprisings and their repression. These works become the stage for inhospitable and unstable environments, traversed by diffuse forces. Further along, a series of Arctic panoramas, recreated from expedition archives, unfold in ranges of nocturnal blues and frosted greys, imbuing these dark landscapes with a suspended, dreamlike quality. At the edge of the Venetian lagoon, they appear to hover between two states – porous to the elements and inhabited by spectral presences ready to dissolve. Finally, a gallery of majestic and enigmatic female figures, presented notably in Tadao Ando’s Cube, confront the viewer with a complexity of identities and the ambiguity of their representation. For the past fifteen years, collage has played a central role in Simpson’s creative process, reflected in the exhibition in a major forty-part installation. Drawing on a vast visual archive, she turns this practice into a field of experimentation where juxtaposition, slippage and free association transform these images into “source notes” that later inspire many of her compositions. The exhibition highlights the richness of a conceptual and visual language that is abundant and gives great importance to intuition. The artist explores collective memory, stereotypes, and the mechanisms of erasure – all critical lenses through which to revisit over half a century of history. The evocation of states of matter and natural phenomena – water, fire, ice, dust, meteorites, clouds – compose an unstable world, one that invites metamorphosis and suspended temporalities.