Lorna Simpson: Unanswerable

Lorna Simpson’s inaugural exhibition at Hauser & Wirth London, ‘Unanswerable’, features new and recent work across three different media: painting, photographic collage and sculpture.

Simpson came to prominence in the 1980s through her pioneering approach to conceptual photography, which featured striking juxtapositions of text and staged images and raised questions about the nature of representation, identity, gender, race and history. These concerns are reflected throughout the exhibition to present the artist’s expanding and increasingly multi-disciplinary practice today.

The theme of natural elements appears as a metaphor throughout the exhibition and in new sculptural works as glistening ‘ice’ blocks made of glass and, in one instance, an oversized ‘snowball’ made of plaster on top of which a small female figure perches precariously. The combination of the absurd and the association of the expression ‘to snowball’, alludes to an unstoppable force that gathers momentum with the potential to slip out of control. For Simpson, ice has a significance since it recalls the expression to be ‘on ice’, or in prison, as well as Eldridge Cleaver’s 1968 book ‘Soul on Ice’, written while the renowned activist was incarcerated in Folsom State Prison. Prison is where one does time and is an enforced form of isolation from wider society. And yet, Simpson remarks, ‘There’s something about ice that has come into the work that indicates either freezing or endurance.’

Hauser & Wirth
23 Savile Row
London W1S 2ET

hauserwirth.com