Zones of instability

The Pinault Collection at Punta della Dogana hosts a major solo exhibition by Lorna Simpson, organized in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where an earlier version of the project was presented in 2025 under the title Source Notes. Curated by Emma Lavigne in direct dialogue with the artist, the Venetian exhibition Third Person offers, for the first time in Europe, such an extensive overview of Simpson’s painting from the past decade, presented alongside collages, videos, sculptures and installations. Around fifty works, drawn from international collections and the artist’s studio, form an exhibition path conceived specifically for the austere and luminous spaces of Punta della Dogana.
Born in Brooklyn in 1960, Lorna Simpson emerged in the mid-1980s with a body of work that redefined American conceptual photography. Her images of unidentified Black figures, often accompanied by brief, fragmentary texts, challenge the supposed transparency of vision. The body appears, yet simultaneously withdraws. The text intervenes, destabilizing interpretation. Viewers are prompted to question their own perceptual habits and cultural automatisms. From the outset, Simpson has examined the mechanisms through which race and gender shape the construction of images in the United States.

The white dress that recurs in her early works, conceived during formative periods spent in Italy, functions as an ambivalent sign: it standardizes, abstracts and suspends identity; at the same time it evokes the material memory of cotton, tied to the economic history of slavery in the American South. In these works clothing becomes a silent device of control and symbolic surveillance. Institutional recognition came early.
In 1990 the Museum of Modern Art devoted Projects 23 to her, the museum’s first solo exhibition dedicated to a Black woman artist. During those years hair became a surface dense with political and cultural meaning. In works such as 1978–88, images of braided hairstyles are paired with words evoking repetitive gestures–braiding, pulling, starting again–introducing a temporal dimension that suggests duration and the sedimentation of experience.
In the 2000s her reflection expanded to the reuse of archival material. In the series 1957–2009, Simpson works with photographs found online, arranging anonymous images of a Black woman in a grid and juxtaposing them with her own imitated and altered poses. The result is not a self-portrait but an exercise in critical distance that dismantles the media construction of the female body. From 2016 onward, her engagement with the archives of Ebony magazine opened a further phase. The collages derived from this material function as “source notes”: visual fragments that place collective memory and dominant narratives in tension.

In the exhibition, an installation composed of forty collages makes this iconographic laboratory visible. Since 2010 painting has assumed a central role in Simpson’s practice. The canvases on view include works created for the 56th International Art Exhibition of the Venice Biennale in 2015, curated by Okwui Enwezor, together with previously unseen works conceived for this occasion. The paintings lead the viewer into zones of instability: dense compositions traversed by enigmatic figures and political tensions evoke uprisings and repression.
A series of Arctic landscapes, reconstructed from expedition archives, unfolds in ranges of nocturnal blues and glacial greys. Natural elements–water, ice, clouds, dust–become metaphors of transformation and erasure. These suspended scenarios oscillate between historical document and painterly imagination, ultimately questioning the very idea of testimony.

Immagine in evidenza: Installation views, Lorna Simpson. Third Person, 2026, Punta della Dogana, Venezia. Ph. James Wang © Palazzo Grassi, Pinault Collection