"For me, this is a very beautiful expansion of the original exhibition," Simpson tells AnOther. "And the space at Punta della Dogana afforded a much broader look in terms of different parts of my practice, which I really appreciate.""
"There are many parts of the fearlessly experimental artist's practice to explore, all unified by the themes that preoccupy her, including "the conditions under which images emerge, the erosion and resurgence of memory, the fickle nature of narratives and their blind spots, or the dynamics of race, power and gender that shape our perceptions", to quote the show's curator, Emma Lavigne, in her introduction to its catalogue."
"Simpson rose to fame in the late 1980s, garnering acclaim for her bold, conceptual approach to photography. Her early works combine images of Black women, usually cropped or seen from behind to render the sitter anonymous, with ambiguous fragments of text. The artist's aim was to "engage with the audience in a way they wouldn't be used to ... to put them off balance," she once explained - something that remains a central tenet of her work."
Lorna Simpson’s exhibition Third Person is presented at Punta della Dogana, a former customs house transformed into a gallery by Tadao Ando. The show features about 50 artworks created between 2014 and 2025, with painting as the primary medium, alongside collage, installation, video, and sculpture. Hosted by the Pinault Collection and sponsored by Bottega Veneta, it expands on Simpson’s earlier exhibition Source Notes shown at the Met in New York. The works center on how images appear, how memory erodes and returns, how narratives shift and reveal blind spots, and how race, power, and gender shape perception. Simpson’s early photography combined images of Black women with ambiguous text fragments to unsettle viewers, and later work broadened into installation and moving image.
#lorna-simpson #contemporary-art #painting-and-mixed-media #memory-and-narrative #race-power-and-gender
Read at AnOther
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]