Lorna Simpson

In Lorna Simpson’s ‘Sonorousness’ (2019), the figurative and the abstract collide. The painting is an illusionistic depiction of an arctic landscape, washed with iridescent shades of blue. Barely discernible, vertical strips of text and a fragmented sliver of a woman’s face swim to the surface, drenched in inky washes of blues. A constructed image, ‘Sonorousness’ is one of a new suite of large-scale paintings by Simpson, which combine her previous pictorial inventions with extensive investigations in appropriated imagery. Simpson uses photography as a discipling structure in these works, composing each painting with archival photographs and texts that are silkscreened onto fiberglass panels and gessoed in colorful expressions of ink and acrylics.

‘Sonorousness’ inaugurates a new approach for Simpson, who since the mid-1980s has continuously challenged herself to evolve. In the last few years Simpson has taken up the medium of painting for the first time in two decades, creating energetic abstractions that are mesmerizing in their opticality and painterliness. A powerful reflection on contemporary American society, ‘Sonorousness’ demonstrates Simpson’s mastery of paint and is an exemplar of her radical blurring of the traditional distinctions between genres.