Lorna Simpson's 'Third Person' at Punta della Dogana Explores Layered Visual Archives

Punta della Dogana in Venice hosts 'Third Person', a major solo exhibition of American artist Lorna Simpson (born 1960), curated by Emma Lavigne. The show spans multiple rooms, opening with three key works: 'Black Totem' (2025), a nearly 4-meter column of stacked Ebony and Jet magazines that serves as a visual archive; 'Nightmare?' (2015), a large painting with an ambiguous spectral figure; and 'Three Figures' (2014), based on an Associated Press photo of a 1963 Birmingham, Alabama civil rights protest, rendered in ink and silkscreen on twelve Claybord panels. Simpson, known since the mid-1980s for conceptual and performative photography, shifted to painting in the mid-2010s. The second room features contemplative Arctic landscapes with emerging bodies and faces, alongside 'Vibrating cycles' (2026) sculptures of stacked porphyry slabs with obsidian singing bowls. Glass blocks simulating ice sit next to magazine piles. A long series of 40 collages, central to her practice for fifteen years, is displayed. In Tadao Ando's Cube, large portraits and enigmatic female figures blend chiaroscuro with star networks and colored mists. Two video works are included: 'Walk with me' (2020), a 14-second loop of three women with digitally assembled faces, and 'Cloudscape' (2004), a single-channel installation of a solitary male figure whistling through fog. The exhibition runs in 2026.