Lorna Simpson

"In January, the artist Lorna Simpson awed readers of Essence magazine with collages featuring photographs of that month’s cover star, Rihanna. The work was a continuation of Simpson’s ongoing “Earth & Sky” series, in which she replaces the hairdos of Black women in vintage advertisements with decoupaged images of precious metals and cosmic matter, challenging notions that our hair is anything less than sublime. The Rihanna collages spanned a dozen of the issue’s pages, in addition to the cover, and in each portrait the artist superimposed photographs she took of the singer over archival images sourced from The Associated Press, decades-old Ebony magazines and even 19th-century geological lithographs. In one work, Rihanna towers over an entire cityscape, larger than life (on set, Simpson directed her to walk and pose as if she were a giant); the contrasting scales of the background and foreground cast the singer in a different light than that in which she is typically portrayed — less musician or paparazzi subject, more mythical being.

By the time Simpson moved back to New York in 1985, she was producing work that examined and pushed back against the stereotypes associated with Black women’s identities, including “Easy for Who to Say” (1989), in which each of five color Polaroids of a woman’s face is blocked out by an oval bearing one of the five vowels. Underneath “A” is the word “Amnesia,” under “E” is “Error,” followed by “Indifference,” “Omission” and “Uncivil.” “She,” a four-panel Polaroid work from 1992, similarly explores the gap between what is revealed and what is hidden, what is written and what is true, inviting the viewer to consider the creation of meaning; it shows the mouth, chin and body of a figure whose gender is uncertain but is seemingly proclaimed by the word “female,” which is mounted in cursive above the panels. Wearing an oversize suit, the subject oozes ambiguity and is smiling, almost defiantly, as if to say, “You can’t box me in.”

"Lorna Simpson executes photography with elegant restraint and a delicate but steady refusal to meet expectations. Combining text with imagery, her early photographs set up an elusive narrative only to deny catharsis. Instead, there is a glitch where the linguistic meets the visual. With neither quite describing the other, this gap generates something more like poetry than prose—open-ended and interpretive.

Brought together at Hauser & Wirth in the most comprehensive show since her 1992 survey at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, her 1980s and 1990s photo work confirms Simpson’s place as an abiding aesthetic revolutionary. Seen in this way, the works in the exhibition betray a surety of the kind that can hone a habit and a viewpoint into a visual voice. With Gestures/Reenactments, Simpson’s MFA thesis from 1985, she interrupted the then-accepted standards for a viewer’s engagement with the photographic image. Six panels depict a Black man, his face cut from the frame as he takes different poses. Below, seven text panels describe fragmentary moments of the intimate and the public, the violent and the passive, the threatening and the benign. The mismatch between the number of photographs and number of text panels curtails the will to read these words as captions. Instead of illuminating, they identify limits: of language, comprehensibility, and of the photographic as documentary. Gently mocking the expectations of knowability set by portraiture and documentary imagery, the paired words and photographs evoke the opposite, calling up the incommunicable, the gestured at but uncapturable, and perhaps above all, the irreducible. There is a knowing here that cannot be wedged into an image, something that Simpson refuses to turn into an object of display."

"Her incendiary collages of vintage black pinups made her one of the most influential artists of her time. Now she’s battling the ‘insanity’ of Trump’s America.

Lorna Simpson is holed up in Los Angeles with her actor daughter right now. She’s been spending lockdown doing one of her favourite things: reflecting on how people present themselves when out in public. All this people-watching has put her in mind of the 1990s, when she would go wig-hunting in Fulton Mall, a blue-collar shopping centre near her home in New York. “Shop after shop sold all sorts of wigs,” says the 59-year-old. “Human hair, yak hair, synthetic hair.” Simpson bought as many as she could, in every style she saw: from platinum-blonde “Lana Turner” wigs to fake afros and braids. She transferred photographs of each one on to panels of felt before hanging them alongside such seemingly disconnected phrases as: “First impressions are the most lasting.” The wigs were a “surrogate”, she says, a way to explore “the person we see ourselves to be”.

Simpson is now one of America’s most significant artists, yet she is not interested in creating brand new images. Instead, she recycles those that already exist, giving them new meaning in a new context. Give Me Some Moments, an online exhibition by Hauser & Wirth London, has just opened, showcasing Simpson’s fusion of found photography, collage, installation, video and, most recently, a dark and turbulent form of painting."