Art
orna Simpson can’t quite say where her
practice is heading. ‘I don’t know,’ she exclaims with
a big belly laugh, a frequent register for the artist. ‘And
maybe that’s my response to even having a response
to the work.’ Don’t think for a minute, though, that
Simpson is somehow lost or unsure of her position.
If almost unassuming in her public profile, particularly
in comparison to many of her more flamboyant
contemporaries, Simpson is definitely in the top tier
of contemporary American artists.
Simpson rose through the ranks as a conceptual
photographer in the 1980s, and has impacted the
medium with her particular use of text, eventually also
branching out into video. Both the Whitney Museum
of American Art and the Walker Art Center picked
up on early Simpson work, subsequently revisiting her
mid-career, and she was the first African-American
woman to exhibit at the Venice Biennale, in 1990.
For the last three years or so, Simpson has swapped
her camera for found photography. Images are
culled from the Associated Press, as well as pioneering
African-American periodicals Jet and Ebony, then
incorporated in paintings, a medium that she debuted
at the 2017 Venice Biennale. ‘All this painting that
I’m doing is closely related to photography,’ she says.
Simpson first silkscreens these found images onto
fibreglass panels before gessoing and washing them
in colourful expressions of paint. She insists, though,
that this process is not aimed at photorealism. ‘I’m not
trying to talk about photography through the medium
of painting.’ Nor is it an effort to summon the classical
muses. ‘I don’t know what [classical painting] is,’ she
cracks, ‘and I don’t think I want to know.’Her latest paintings, as well as new collages and
sculptures, will appear at a show at Hauser & Wirth
in London in March. She signed with the gallery
last April, a move that prompted her to ‘think more
ambitiously about what I want to do. It was a great
fit in terms of how I saw myself as an artist, and
in assisting me in what I want to accomplish next
at this point in my life.’
‘It is clear that she is an artist who continually
evolves,’ says Iwan Wirth, one of the gallery’s founders.
‘I believe that Lorna is a central voice in a generation
of American artists. For me, the work is so compelling
because she confronts the personal and public
significance of past and current events while taking
an intellectual approach to a variety of media.’ ‘I always
think in series, not individual works,’ says Simpson.
And the new works build on an installation she
presented at Frieze New York last year. ‘I didn’t want to
make Frieze just a one-off. I wanted to mine that work.’
Reflecting on the past two years, Simpson notes
that ‘the landscape of my personal life and the
landscape of the world that we’re living in now – and
not to be a fatalist or victim – certainly has had an
intensity to it.’ One night recently, Zora, her 18-year-old
daughter with fellow artist James Casebere and
something of a social media it-girl, read her a passage
from The Secret History by Donna Tartt and the word
‘unanswerable’ jumped out. ‘I feel it doesn’t get
used very often.’ It connotes, she says, ‘silence, and
the posing of a question that, in its context or premise,
makes no sense. There’s no answer, not because it’s
“unanswerable”, but the nature of the question makes
it unable to be answered.’ That’s the schism, possibility,L
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