Slip (left) and Suspended (right)

Lorna Simpson
Born in Brooklyn, New York, USA , in 1960.
She lives and works in Brooklyn.

Lorna Simpson first became known in the mid-1980s for her conceptual and performative approach to photography. Her signature style, which combined large-scale photographs with accompanying texts, challenged conventional views of gender, race, identity, culture, history, and memory. A recurring motif in Simpson’s early work is a back view of an African-American female wearing a loosely fitting white dress, her head cropped out by the format of the image. These early works reflect her attempt to circumvent stereotypical representations of black subjects and instead to develop a visual language that allows for multiple and complex readings. The 1990s marked a shift in Simpson’s practice, when she began to develop large-scale photographic works printed on grids of felted fabric; accompanying text panels alluded to protocinematic moments. The human figure was abandoned, to be replaced by architectural, landscape, and interior subjects. By this time she had also begun to experiment with film and video, which soon became an essential part of her practice.
Simpson’s work addresses critical social subjects with exceptional formal elegance. Like a visual ethnographer, she uses her photographic lens to analyze how the black figure, especially the female, is represented in American visual culture. With the precision of a scientist, she investigates human gestures, poses, and hairstyles in order to question racial, gender, and social stereotypes. In her work one rarely finds a complete human figure. Instead, she presents fragments of the human body that speak to specific cultural contexts. In the 2000s, Simpson expanded her practice into (self)representation by collecting and working with existing photographic archives that she acquired online, images that helped to broaden the terrain of her complex examinations of race and identity and its performativity.
Her new body of work on view at the 56th Biennale di Venezia presents a more painterly side of Simpson’s work. While remaining true to her interest in the female figure, she further disassembles and rearranges the bodies of her subjects. Not unlike the surrealist technique of “exquisite corpse,” she twists bodily parts and favors extreme perspectives, turning them into enigmatic signs and symbols.