Lorna Simpson — Jeu de Paume, Concorde — Exhibition — Slash Paris

Past: May 28 → September 1, 2013

Lorna Simpson au Jeu de Paume Pour sa première exposition en Europe, l’artiste new-yorkaise Lorna Simpson éblouit quand elle ne déçoit pas. Le jeu de Paume quant... 1 - Pas mal Critique

For her first European retrospective, the Jeu de Paume presents thirty years of Lorna Simpson’s work. For this Afro-American artist, born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1960, the synthesis between image and text is profound and intimate. If one were to consider Lorna Simpson as a writer, the textual element of her works could have an autonomous life as prose poems, very short stories or fragments of scripts. And yet, her texts are inseparable from her images; there is a dynamic between the two that is both fragile and energising, which links them unfailingly.

Lorna Simpson, Stereo Styles [Styles stéréo] 1988, 0 Dix Polaroid dye-diffusion noir et blanc, dix plaques en plastique gravées — 146,7 × 318,1 × 3,5 cm l’ensemble Collection Melva Bucksbaum et Raymond Learsy © Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson became known in the 1980s and 90s for her photographs and films that shook up the conventions of gender, identity, culture and memory. Throughout her work, the artist tackles the complicated representation of the black body, using different media, while her texts add a significance that always remains open to the spectator’s imagination.

In her recent work, Lorna Simpson has integrated archive images, which she reinvents by positioning herself in them as subject. As the artist underlines:

“The theme I turn to most often is memory. But beyond this subject, the underlying thread is my relationship to text and ideas about representation.”

Lorna Simpson

Lorna Simpson, Momentum 2010, 0 Vidéo HD, couleur, son — 6’56” Courtesy l’artiste, Salon 94, New York, et Galerie Nathalie Obadia, Paris/Bruxelles. © Lorna Simpson

This retrospective reveals the continuity in her conceptual and performative research. In her works linking photography and text, as well as in her video installations, she integrates — while continually shaking them up — the genres of fixed and moving images, using them to ask questions about identity, history, reality and fiction. She introduces complexity through her use of photography and film, in her exploitation of found objects, in the processes she develops to take on the challenges she sets herself and to spectators.