Inside Lorna Simpson’s Standout Venice Exhibition

In one of the most powerful off-site shows at this year’s Venice Biennale, the acclaimed American artist explores the echoes between past and present, between humans and nature, and between fiction and fact

One of the most stirring exhibitions coinciding with this year’s Venice Biennale comes courtesy of the lauded American artist Lorna Simpson, whose poetic work fills the ground floor of the Punta della Dogana, a former customs house, deftly transformed into an art gallery by the Japanese architect Tadao Ando. The show features some 50 artworks made between 2014 and 2025, with a primary focus on painting – although collage, installation, video and sculpture all feature too – under the title Third Person. Hosted by the Pinault Collection and sponsored by Bottega Veneta, it is an extension of Simpson’s acclaimed exhibition Source Notes, which showed at the Met last year in the artist’s native New York. “For me, this is a very beautiful expansion of the original exhibition,” Simpson tells AnOther. “And the space at Punta della Dogana afforded a much broader look in terms of different parts of my practice, which I really appreciate.”

There are many parts of the fearlessly experimental artist’s practice to explore, all unified by the themes that preoccupy her, including “the conditions under which images emerge, the erosion and resurgence of memory, the fickle nature of narratives and their blind spots, or the dynamics of race, power and gender that shape our perceptions”, to quote the show’s curator, Emma Lavigne, in her introduction to its catalogue.

Simpson rose to fame in the late 1980s, garnering acclaim for her bold, conceptual approach to photography. Her early works combine images of Black women, usually cropped or seen from behind to render the sitter anonymous, with ambiguous fragments of text. The artist’s aim was to “engage with the audience in a way they wouldn’t be used to ... to put them off balance,” she once explained – something that remains a central tenet of her work. 

In the 90s and 2000s, Simpson expanded her practice to incorporate installation, film and video, building upon her interest in non-linear storytelling, in racialised histories and fragmented identities. But it was only in the 2010s that she arrived at drawing, collage and painting – the key components of Third Person. She had, in fact, studied painting as an undergraduate at the School of Visual Arts in New York, but deciding she couldn’t paint as well as her peers, soon shunned it for photography. “I found myself spending all my time taking photographs or in the dark room, really learning the craft,” she recalls. So why the return to more manual mediums? “I was at a point when I really loved making videos, but I wanted to find something that would allow me to sit and make something and move on. So I started doing ink drawings.” 

Collage followed – using the stacks of vintage Ebony and Jet magazines that she’d accumulated over the years, along with old newspaper archives. “When friends see me make collages, they’re like, ‘Oh my god, the way your brain works, sorting and culling imagery, is not normal!’” Simpson laughs. “I enjoy looking at images so much. There’s so much out there that’s surreal in itself, and just changing one element – but doing it in a way where I’m not second-guessing myself or trying to impose a narrative ... it’s a nice way to unlock my imagination.”

A large display of Simpson’s collages, titled Unanswerable (2018), occupies one whole room of the show, allowing visitors a peek inside such processes. As is so often the case with Simpson’s work, there is an oneiric absurdity to them – a deer with a woman’s head lying on the bed; figures in domestic settings being engulfed by snow, fire, clouds. (Images that “rematerialise our belonging to the world”, to use Lavigne’s words, recur throughout the exhibition – from Arctic panoramas reconstructed from expedition archives, and often featuring spectral forms, to a sculpture of a giant snowball topped by a contemplative female figure, and stacks of Ebony and Jet magazines crowned with glass sculptures resembling oversized ice cubes.)

Simpson has never been afraid to take on new mediums, or to make mistakes, which is how she found herself back at painting decades after she decided she wasn’t good at it – spoiler alert: she is. “I’m not one to rush with, ‘Is this going to be good, or is this something you’re going to show?’ she says. “The end product is of the least interest. It’s more about the process of letting go and seeing what happens.” Her goal, she says, is to resist making assumptions about what she can or can’t do. “It starts with a research process and, on a conceptual level, an idea. Then I try to back away from what it is I do – to not implement what I’m used to doing – to solve that idea.”

Whatever form the solution takes, however, it is always rooted in Simpson’s love for photography and interest in modes of reproduction. Some of the show’s most striking paintings, including Three Figures and Then and Now, are screenprints of photographs taken during the Detroit and Alabama race riots – but cropped, enlarged, and overlaid with ink and acrylic paint, which adds to the sense of chaos and violence.

While the imagery at the centre of these works is archival, their resonance with today’s political climate is all too pertinent. “My work is my work and all those things are in the work,” Simpson says when I ask if she and Lavigne chose to include such pieces for this reason. “With regard to American politics, it’s the origins of how the United States was formed, and an undercurrent of the past 200 years – which, in terms of culture, is a really short period of time. My parents grew up under Jim Crow, my grandmother also. Her father, their parents, were slaves. These things come up – and now it has gotten to an intensity and destructiveness that has left me lost for words – but they haven’t ever really quite gone away or been fully resolved.”

What Simpson’s work does then is provide a catalyst for contemplation about such topics, and many more, through combinations of images and combinations of materials that surprise and challenge. And the show boasts moments of hope, too: in a room full of monumental paintings of Black women, rendered in cosmic combinations of deep blues and blacks and irridescent greys, and dotted with gold; in a central space filled with obsidian singing bowls that visitors are invited to strike with a gong, resulting in a hauntingly beautiful chorus – collectively activated, soft but strong.

Lorna Simpson: Third Person is on show at the Punta della Dogana in Venice until 22 November 2026. With special thanks to The Pinault Collection.