Marking her first UK presentation in eight years, the pioneering conceptual artist lands at Hauser & Wirth with ‘Previous & Ongoing’—an icy, multi-medium confrontation with history.
For nearly four decades, Lorna Simpson has operated as one of conceptual art’s most incisive excavators. Rising to prominence in the late 1980s and 90s by disrupting photojournalistic authority and race-gender stereotypes, the Brooklyn-born titan built an aesthetic universe that treats archives not as dead history, but as volatile, ongoing political material. Now, returning to London for her first UK exhibition in nearly a decade, Simpson presents Previous & Ongoing at Hauser & Wirth—a survey bridging painting, collage, and glass sculpture.
Fresh off landmark exhibitions at The Met in New York and Venice’s Punta della Dogana, Simpson’s latest body of work dissolves the boundaries between historical artifact and contemporary urgency.
“Simpson doesn’t just display archival fragments—she shatters them, layering vintage print media with icy glazes and raw gesture until history feels like a lucid dream you can’t wake up from.”
At the heart of the show is Simpson’s relentless cannibalization of print history. Drawing from vintage issues of Jet and Ebony magazines, discarded photo booth portraits, and wire service news photography from the Associated Press, her canvases fuse screenprinted archival imagery with sweeping, tempestuous acrylic washes in shades of arctic blue and void-black. In her hands, motifs of polar ice, cosmic nightfalls, and anonymous Black bodies migrate seamlessly across media—extending into glistening, heavy glass block sculptures that trap memory in physical space.