It is the first major European survey dedicated to the artist. An evocative and unstable journey through paintings, collages, sculptures, installations, and videos
In Venice, at Punta della Dogana, arrives the first major European survey dedicated to Lorna Simpson, curated by Emma Lavigne. The works come from private collections and international institutions; some were created specifically for the The artist was born in Brooklyn in 1960 to an African American mother and a father of Jamaican-Cuban origin; she grew up in New York’s lively cultural atmosphere, encouraged in her artistic pursuits. Highly determined, she broke onto the international scene as early as the mid-1980s. In 1990, she would be the first African American woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale. Her multicultural background and the civil rights movements of the time pushed her toward a research that examines the complexity of identity, race, and gender. She shows how Black bodies were classified and objectified by society (the photographic series Guarded Conditions, late 1980s) without losing sight of the multiple facets of the human experience (the Wigs series, 1990s).
Her art is an effective form of refined and conceptual social activism that dialogues with the will to universalize the temporal dimension: “In many works, there is the specter of how we interpret the world we live in through the memories we have and how these memories are diminished or ignored,” the artist suggests. In this way, newspaper clippings (especially from Ebony and Jet, pillars of African American society) and purchased or taken photographic images gain precious value, composing a vast archive of personal and collective memory. An operation of infinite and unpredictable layers and interconnections drives Lorna Simpson’s research, from the conceptual photography of her beginnings to the painting she has widely reclaimed since the mid-2010s. The artist explores the mechanisms of image construction by assembling photographs and painting on unconventional materials, questioning, even in her videos, the perceptual automatisms of the viewer. In Venice, the large paintings from the Ice series, ready to fade, develop in resonant blues of unreal dimensions, and the inquiries into identity continue with the Special Characters series, up to the pop revisiting of the Earth and Sky collages. An evocative and unstable path among paintings, collages, sculptures, installations, and videos. Whatever it represents, Lorna Simpson’s work is always permeated by the need to integrate every aspect of human experience into a vast immanent organism and, like a continuous flow that precedes everything else, it always questions and pins down the gaze.
Her art is a form of refined and conceptual social activism that dialogues with the desire to universalize the temporal dimension
