Lorna Simpson
Darkening

Opens on Thursday 25 April, 6 – 8 pm 25 Apr – 26 Jul 2019 New York, 22nd Street
Using Black to Paint Light: Walking Through a Matisse Exhibit Thinking about the Arctic and Matthew Henson (an excerpt) The unanticipated shock: so much believed to be white is actually – strikingly – blue. Endless blueness. White is blue. An ocean wave freezes in place. Blue. Whole glaciers, large as Ohio, floating masses of static water. All of them pale frosted azuls. It makes me wonder – yet again – was there ever such a thing as whiteness? I am beginning to grow suspicious. An open window. I am blue. I am a frozen blue ocean. I am a wave struck cold in midair. The wave is nude beneath her blue dress. Her skin is blue. —– Robin Coste Lewis

About

Hauser & Wirth is pleased to present ‘Lorna Simpson. Darkening,’ the artist’s first solo exhibition with the gallery in New York. Debuting a suite of new large-scale paintings, the exhibition finds Simpson returning to and building upon themes and motifs at the center of her practice: explorations focused on the nature of representation, identity, gender, race, and history. For more than 30 years, Simpson’s powerful works have entangled viewers in an equivocal web of meaning, drawing upon techniques of collage through the use of found materials, often culled from the pages of vintage Jet and Ebony magazines. In ‘Darkening,’ Simpson continues to thread dichotomies of figuration and abstraction with vast and enthralling tableaux that subsume spliced photos and fragmented text, abstracted beyond comprehension. Equally arresting and poetic, the paintings engage viewers with layers of paradox, capturing the mystifying allure of an arctic landscape in inky washes of blacks, grays, and startling blues.

Selected images

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Installation views

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Events

Thu 25 Apr 2019, 6:00
Opening reception: ‘Lorna Simpson. Darkening’
New York, 22nd Street

Join us for the opening reception of works by Lorna Simpson in New York. Over the past 30 years, Simpson has continued to probe questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race, and history, while expanding her oeuvre to encompass various media including film and…
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About the artist

Born in Brooklyn, Lorna Simpson came to prominence in the 1980s with her pioneering approach to conceptual photography. Simpson’s early work—particularly her striking juxtapositions of text and staged images—raised questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race and history that continue…

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Current Exhibitions

Current Exhibitions


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