LORNA SIMPSON

Previous & Ongoing Hauser & Wirth 13 October–23 December 2026 London

Press Release

Lorna Simpson returns to the UK for the first time in eight years with an exhibition of new works that revealthe symbiotic relationship between her paintings, collages and wider oeuvre. Coming to prominence in the1990s for her pioneering approach to conceptual photography, Simpson’s masterful paintings have become adefining facet of her creative output following her turn to the medium in 2014. From multi-panel compositionsand largescale paintings to sculpture, the works on view are anchored by the artist’s sustained engagement withdefunct news photography. Treating these fragments of the past as carriers of memory, she sources, reconfiguresand reproduces archival material to both reveal how histories persist and accrue new meaning over time.

Simpson’s first survey dedicated to her painting practice was displayed in a major solo exhibition at theMetropolitan Museum of Art, New York NY in 2025, followed by a solo show at Punta della Dogana (PinaultCollection) in Venice, Italy, the most significant presentation of her work in Europe in over a decade, currentlyon view until 22 November 2026.

About the exhibition

Drawn to images with an inherent ‘matter-of-fact absurdity,’ Lorna Simpson mines and selects photographsfrom vintage Jet and Ebony magazines and the archives of the Library of Congress, Reuters and AssociatedPress. The artist uses these source materials to structure her paintings, beginning each work with silkscreenedarchival photographs and layering them with acrylics to produce painterly collages. In doing so, she transformsthem into layered compositions that blur the boundary between past and present, documentation andfabrication, reality and imagination.

Simpson repeatedly returns to visual records from the past that have resonance in the present day, speakingto the persistence of societal issues such as racial violence and police brutality. Lending its name to theexhibition title, ‘Previous & Ongoing’ (2026) is rooted in documentary photographs that once bore witness toreal-life events, which the artist amplifies and reconfigures to draw attention to their jarring, unsettling nature.In ‘Yesterday/Today’ (2026), engulfing smoke plumes are juxtaposed with an inverted volcano, motifs that bothinvite associations of upheaval and destruction, while the multi-panel work ‘Wounded’ (2026) assimilates dripsof acrylic to blood from a gunshot wound. Across these paintings, the images could easily be mistaken for thepresent moment were it not for giveaways from the pixelated archival material.

Visible within the composition of ‘Strata’ (2026) is the folio line for Ebony magazine. This remnant of thepast reminds viewers of the source material, which was founded in 1945 to chronicle African American livesand issues under-represented elsewhere, and is harnessed by Simpson to interrogate the representationof American communities today. Binding together countless stories and records from the magazine, thecylindrical sculpture ‘Well Rounded’ (2026) is formed of compressed copies of Ebony, resulting in a monumentthat attests to the archive as a repository of memory.

Throughout her varied subjects, blue is a powerful carrier of meaning for the artist, who uses the color to alludeto the nighttime sky, the name ‘blue marble’ for the Earth, the emotional connotations, the history of indigocultivation and ‘blue black’ culture. The significance of the colour is not only conveyed through pigments butoccasionally through the titles of Simpson’s paintings, such as ‘Builder Black Blue’ (2026). Adapted from theearlier monochrome collage ‘Los Angeles’ (2019), the triptych ‘Nightfall’ (2026) depicts two singers layered ontop of a Prussian blue vista spanning six meters, offering a monumental tribute to the musical blues throughboth the subject and the artist’s use of color. This work reveals a linear relationship between Simpson’s collageand painting, whereby she translates the dreamlike essence of her works on paper into vibrant acrylics.

Since the beginning of her practice Simpson has spliced together images to create new narratives that emergefrom unexpected elements. In the painting ‘Constellation’ (2026), the artist overlays a found group portraitwith a star chart rendered in ultramarine, transforming it into an otherworldly configuration. The surreal scenein ‘Tiger with star spots’ (2025) existed as a picture in its own right, which the artist first employed in thecollage ‘Beach Walk’ (2023). Depicting a person wearing a tiger mascot head walking down a beach, the artist morphs the figure with a celestial map to amplify its incongruity. ‘Altered & Unaltered’ (2026), the only collageon view, is made up of found images of cats that are combined with female protagonists to create fantasticalscenarios while simultaneously imbuing a distinct sense of ambiguity. Together, these mismatched figuresreflect Simpson’s assertion that ‘we’re fragmented not only in terms of how society regulates our bodies but inthe way we think about ourselves.’ Across painting, collage and sculpture, Simpson takes these relics of thepast and reshapes them for the present, dissolving the distinction between that which was previous and thatwhich is ongoing.

Courtesy Hauser & Wirth.