Published by Marsilio Arte. Edited by Emma Lavigne.
Rising to prominence in the mid-1980s for her innovative approach to conceptual photography, American artist Lorna Simpson (born 1960) has continued to turn a critical gaze on the mechanisms of image composition—particularly within America, where racial and gender biases profoundly shape people’s perceptions of themselves and others. Since the middle of the 2010s, painting has become a particularly fertile field of exploration for the artist, expanding the ways she tackles the great questions that lie at the center of her work: the erosion and rebirth of memory, the pitfalls of representation, the instability of narratives. In her intensely saturated, atmospheric paintings, majestic female figures frequently emerge from the pictorial matter, squarely confronting the viewer’s gaze. This monograph showcases over a decade of Simpson’s innovative painting practice alongside collages, videos, sculptures and installations. It features approximately 50 works, including canvases created for the 56th Venice Biennale, as well as several brand-new pieces.
Published by Aspen Art Press. Text by Hilton Als, Connie Butler, Franklin Sirmans, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson, Anna Deveare Smith.
One of the leading artists of her generation, Lorna Simpson (born 1960) came to prominence in the mid-1980s through her photographic and textual works that challenged conventional attitudes toward race, gender and cultural memory with a potent mixture of formal elegance and conceptual rigor. Published on the occasion of her 2013 exhibition at Aspen Art Museum, Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper highlights four recent bodies of work on paper that explore the complex relationship between the photographic archive and processes of self-fashioning, including a new group of works being developed during her time as the AAM’s 2013 Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence. As in Simpson’s earlier works, these new drawings and collages take the African-American woman as a point of departure, continuing her longstanding examination of the ways that gender and culture shape the experience of life in our contemporary multiracial society. This beautifully illustrated catalogue features new scholarship by New Yorker staff writer Hilton Als, MoMA Chief Curator of Drawings, Connie Butler, LACMA Chief Curator of Contemporary Art, Franklin Sirmans, and the AAM’s Nancy and Bob Magoon CEO and Director, Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson.
Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper