Lorna Simpson's solo exhibition offers, for the first time in Europe, a comprehensive overview dedicated to over a decade of her painting practice. Created in partnership with the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where a version titled "Source Notes" curated by Loren Rosati was presented in the spring of 2025, the exhibition in Venice renews the exhibition path by bringing together about fifty works - paintings, collages, sculptures, installations, and a film - from private collections, international institutions, the artist's studio, and new works created specifically for the exhibition at Punta della Dogana.

The exhibition is conceived by Emma Lavigne, general director of the Pinault Collection and chief curator, in close dialogue with the artist. The Venetian path offers a selection specifically designed for the spaces of Punta della Dogana, through which the artist constructs the narrative threads that shape the fictional universes and stories suggested by her work.

Revealed in the mid-1980s for her innovative approach to conceptual photography, Lorna Simpson (born in 1960, United States) has never stopped critically exploring the mechanisms of image construction. From the mid-2010s, painting has emerged as a particularly fertile field of exploration in her work, through which she extends and deepens the major themes that run through her work: the erosion and reappearance of memory, the gaps in representation, and the instability of narratives.

The exhibition brings together significant bodies of work from the most emblematic series of this period, including Ice, Special Characters, and Earth and Sky. It spans over twenty years of activity, including some of the paintings created for the artist's participation in the Venice Biennale in 2015, curated by Okwui Enwezor, to the presentation of several new works created specifically for the exhibition. Resistant to any singular interpretation, her works lead us into uncertain zones at the margins of the visible. The exhibition is structured around three nuclei that mark the path. It opens with a first group of compositions featuring enigmatic figures, historical echoes, and political tensions evoking uprisings and their repression. These works become the stage for inhospitable and unstable environments, traversed by diffuse forces. It continues with a series of Arctic landscapes, recreated based on expedition archives, developing into ranges of nocturnal blues and icy grays, giving these dark landscapes a suspended and unreal dimension. On the threshold of the Venetian lagoon, these works seem to float between two states, porous to the elements and inhabited by spectral presences ready to dissolve. Finally, a gallery of portraits and enigmatic and majestic female figures, presented particularly in Tadao Ando's Cube, confronts the gaze with the complexity of identities and the ambiguity of their representation.