Lorna Simpson returns to Europe with one of her most extensive exhibitions in recent years at Punta della Dogana. Titled “Third Person,” the exhibition offers a broad overview of the artist’s evolving practice while placing particular emphasis on her large-scale paintings and immersive installations. Developed in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Venetian presentation expands upon the earlier exhibition “Source Notes,“ originally shown in New York in spring 2025, while introducing newly commissioned works created specifically for the spaces of Punta della Dogana.
Bringing together nearly fifty works across multiple mediums, including painting, collage, sculpture, film, and installation, the exhibition draws from the Pinault Collection, international museums, private collections, and Simpson’s own archive. Rather than functioning as a traditional retrospective, “Third Person” unfolds as a carefully constructed visual narrative shaped through a close dialogue between Simpson and curator Emma Lavigne.
Since emerging in the 1980s with her influential conceptual photography, Simpson has consistently explored the ways identity, memory, and representation are constructed through images. In recent years, painting has become increasingly central to her practice, allowing her to push these investigations into more atmospheric and psychologically charged territories. Across the exhibition, fragmented narratives, historical echoes, and shifting emotional registers create spaces that feel simultaneously intimate and elusive.
The exhibition is structured around three major bodies of work. One group of paintings presents layered compositions populated by ambiguous figures and subtle political tensions, evoking landscapes marked by unrest, fragility, and unease. Another series draws inspiration from archival imagery of Arctic expeditions, transforming frozen terrains into dreamlike environments rendered in deep blues, silvery greys, and muted tonal gradients. These haunting landscapes appear suspended between memory and disappearance, inhabited by almost ghostly traces.
A final sequence of monumental works occupies the iconic Cube designed by Tadao Ando. Here, Simpson introduces enigmatic female figures whose presence oscillates between visibility and obscurity, confronting viewers with layered questions surrounding identity, projection, and perception.
Throughout “Third Person,“ Simpson continues her long-standing investigation into the instability of images and the stories they carry. By blending archival references with fictional narratives and painterly abstraction, the artist constructs visual worlds that resist fixed interpretation, inviting viewers into spaces where memory, history, and imagination constantly overlap.
Lorna Simpson online:
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Photo: (c) courtesy of the artist and Hauser & Wirth