Lorna Simpson. Third Person

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 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.