Lorna Simpson's "Third Person" Exhibition at Punta della Dogana

In Venice, situated on the landmass separating the Grand Canal from the Giudecca Canal, the historic Dogana da Mar—for nearly two decades an Italian cultural outpost for François Pinault—is divided this year. Instead of a single grand exhibition as seen with the solo shows of Thomas Schütte and Pierre Huyghe, two distinct projects are presented within the spaces restored by Tadao Ando. The upper floor hosts Algebra, a sophisticated solo exhibition by Brazilian artist Paulo Nazareth, while the ground floor features Lorna Simpson: Third Person.

Curated by Emma Lavigne, this exhibition, featuring over fifty works including paintings, collages, and installations, is the most extensive presentation of Lorna Simpson's art in Europe in the last decade. Developed in collaboration with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where a version titled Source Notes was shown in Spring 2025, the Venice project continues the exploration of the American artist's oeuvre, with a particular emphasis on her painting production.

Despite the striking visual impact of the paintings displayed at Punta della Dogana until November 22nd, collage remains the exhibition's undisputed focal point. It is not merely an artistic technique but a critical stance—a modus operandi that informs and revitalizes every medium Simpson engages with. She wrote in 2018: "The notion of fragmentation, especially of the body, is prevalent in our culture and is reflected in my work. We are fragmented not only by the way society regulates our bodies but also by the way we think about ourselves."

To better grasp this approach, let's rewind to the mid-1980s. Inspired by African-American feminist artists like Adrian Piper and Lorraine O’Grady, Simpson began to treat photography as a construct to be disassembled and deconstructed. In these early works, she combined images and text to reflect on the perception of the Black body, particularly the female form. Even in this initial phase of her research, an attention to fragmentation—whether verbal or photographic—is evident.

Over time, these reflections evolved into highly refined collages, many of which are displayed at Punta della Dogana, side-by-side like tesserae of a single worldview. By cutting and pasting found images, Simpson manages to evoke unexpected associations and create composite, unsettling figures.

A significant portion of the images Simpson works with are sourced from Ebony and Jet magazines, rooted in her childhood memories. These magazines form a rich archive of symbols and memories that also nourish other works in the exhibition. This is the case with Black Totem: an assembly of vintage magazine pages that form a tall, slender column, a true secular totem that references the collective memory of the African American community. More modest versions of these columns can be found in other sculptures, such as 5 Properties, Missing Film and Tried by Fire, where magazines are merged with other objects like glass cubes and sculpted busts.

The logic of cutting and photographic recomposition reappears in larger-format works: fragments move from the page and coalesce into videos and installations. The sculpture Woman on Snowball, for example, is a large-scale transposition of a collage from the Unanswerable series—a female figure sits on an enormous snowball, creating an apparently absurd image.

The same approach also imbues the paintings, presented here both hung on the wall and resting on the floor. Simpson, in this case too, begins with faces from advertisements and archival material, which she then blurs, rotates, overexposes, and reconfigures. Vibrant colors and smudges disrupt the clarity of the images, introducing fissures that reflect the complexity and multiplicity of the identities represented.

Within this palimpsest of cutouts and superimpositions, Simpson reminds us that identity is not a given but a precarious montage of external gazes. The body is dismembered and reassembled not for exhibition, but to be finally liberated from the dictatorship of representation. From this emerges a "third person" that observes us from the edge of the frame.