In 2026, Punta della Dogana dedicates a major exhibition to Lorna Simpson, offering for the first time in Europe a comprehensive overview of her painting practice. Organized in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where an earlier version titled Source Notes was presented in the spring of 2025, the Venetian exhibition is curated by Emma Lavigne, Director General and Chief Curator of the Pinault Collection, in close dialogue with the artist. The show is designed specifically for the spaces of Punta della Dogana and brings together around fifty works – paintings, collages, sculptures, installations, and a film – from private collections, international institutions, and the artist’s studio, including previously unseen works created for this exhibition.
Emerging in the mid-1980s for her innovative approach to conceptual photography, Lorna Simpson (b. 1960, United States) has consistently explored the mechanisms behind image-making, particularly within the American context shaped by racial and gendered representations. Since the mid-2010s, painting has become a central field of experimentation, allowing her to deepen the core themes of her work: memory and its erosion, fractures in representation, and the instability of narratives.
The exhibition spans over twenty years of her work, from paintings presented at the 56th Venice Biennale in 2015, curated by Okwui Enwezor, to new works created for Punta della Dogana. The show is organized around thematic clusters: compositions featuring enigmatic figures, political tensions, and historical resonances; Arctic landscapes recreated from expedition archives, oscillating between deep blues and icy grays, evoking a suspended, otherworldly atmosphere; and a gallery of portraits and majestic female figures displayed in Tadao Ando’s Cube, examining the complexity of identity and the ambiguity of representation.
For about fifteen years, collage has played a central role in Simpson’s creative process, exemplified by an installation of around forty works that demonstrates her practice of juxtaposition, shifts in meaning, and free association of images. Through this technique, Simpson transforms archival materials and visual sources into “source notes” that inspire many of her paintings, exploring collective memory, stereotypes, and mechanisms of erasure. The evocation of material states and natural phenomena – water, ice, fire, dust, clouds – creates an unstable, suspended universe, conducive to metamorphosis, fluid temporality, and profound reflections on memory and human experience.
Featured image: Lorna Simpson, Woman on Snowball
