PRESENTATION:Lorna Simpson-Previous & Ongoing

Lorna Simpson is a pioneering American conceptual artist renowned for exploring race, gender, and identity, particularly focusing on the African American female experience. She rose to prominence with signature photo-text works, pairing staged studio portraits—often with subjects turned away or obscured—with enigmatic text to challenge societal stereotypes and visual representation. Her practice spans conceptual photography, video installations, sculpture, and vintage magazine collage.

By Dimitris LEmpesis
Photo: Hauser & Wirth Gallery Archive

Lorna Simpson’s return to the United Kingdom after eight years marks a significant chapter in her evolving practice. Hosted at Hauser & Wirth London, the exhibition “Previous & Ongoing” brings together multi-panel acrylics, silkscreened paintings, collages, and sculpture. The presentation demonstrates the fluid, symbiotic dialogue between her early conceptual photography and the monumental painterly language she has developed since turning to painting in 2014.

At the heart of the exhibition is Simpson’s sustained engagement with defunct news photography and vintage Black press archives. Sourcing material from the Library of Congress, Associated Press, Reuters, and vintage issues of Jet and Ebony, Simpson unearths images characterized by an inherent matter-of-fact absurdity.

Rather than treating these historical documents as static relics, she uses them as structural foundations. Works begin with silkscreened archival imagery, over which she applies dense, expressive layers of acrylic paint. This technique merges historical documentation with painterly fabrication, creating surfaces where past events continuously press into the present moment. In compositions like “Yesterday/Today” and “Wounded”, halftone dots and pixelated archival textures serve as visual indicators of historical distance, even as the subjects—racial injustice, societal upheaval, and police violence—mirror contemporary crises.

The title work “Previous & Ongoing” amplifies documentary photographs of historical events to confront the persistence of systemic violence. In “Nightfall”, a six-meter triptych adapted from her 2019 monochrome collage “Los Angeles”, Simpson depicts two singers against a Prussian blue landscape, honoring musical blues traditions. The painting “Strata” retains the visible folio line of Ebony magazine, grounding the composition in mid-century Black print media history. Meanwhile, the cylindrical sculpture “Well Rounded” is formed from densely compressed copies of Ebony, transforming the publication into a physical repository of collective memory. Furthering these visual dialogues, “Constellation” and “Tiger with star spots” overlay portraits and surreal figures—such as a tiger mascot on a beach in “Beach Walk”—with ultramarine celestial charts.

Throughout the exhibition, the color blue serves as a thematic anchor and visual axis. Far beyond a simple pigment choice, Simpson deploys shades ranging from rich ultramarine to deep Prussian blue, as seen in works like “Builder Black Blue”, to evoke multifaceted associations. The hue evokes both the cosmic nocturnal sky and the Earth as the blue marble, while simultaneously referencing the global history of indigo cultivation and blue black culture. Visually and conceptually, it channels the melancholic and resilient history of the musical blues, most prominently showcased in the monumental triptych “Nightfall”.

In “Altered & Unaltered”, the sole paper collage in the show, Simpson splices found images of cats with enigmatic female figures to construct fantastical, ambiguous scenarios. This method of visual juxtaposition underlines Simpson’s commentary on human experience, where she notes that we are fragmented not only in terms of how society regulates our bodies, but in the way we think about ourselves.

By recontextualizing historical photojournalism through paint, collage, and sculpture, “Previous & Ongoing” reveals an artist continually breaking down temporal boundaries. Simpson turns the archive into an active mirror, asserting that the events of yesterday remain perpetually active in the socio-political reality of today.

Photo: Lorna Simpson, Previous & Ongoing, 2026, Acrylic and screenprint on claybord, 182.9 x 304.8 x 3.8  cm / 72 x 120 x 1 1/2 in, © Lorna Simpson, Photo: Jame Wang, Courtesy the artist and Hauser & Wirth Gallery

Info: Hauser & Wirth Gallery, 23 Savile Row London, United Kingdom, Duration: 13/10-23/12/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.hauserwirth.com/