Exhibitions

Lorna Simpson

Venice, Italy

This is the most significant presentation of Lorna Simpson’s work in Europe in more than a decade, with around 50 works including painting, collage, sculpture, installation and film.

Lorna Simpson

Image credit

Lorna Simpson, Specific Notation, 2019, courtesy of Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland; did time elapse, 2024, courtesy of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Purchase, Cheryl and Blair Effron, Lila Acheson Wallace, The Holly Peterson Foundation, and Modern Circle Gifts, 2025 (2025.14)

Meet the artist

The Movement

Contemporary Art, Contemporary photography, Contemporary Sculpture

ArtLovers Tip

A must-see Venice 2026 exhibition: elegant, political, atmospheric, and quietly devastating — the kind of show that stays with you after you leave the lagoon. This is a slow exhibition. Let the works become strange before you try to understand them.

Exhibition Highlights - What you'll see

Images that refuse to stay still: memory, Black identity, weather, silence, and power unfolding inside one of Venice’s most atmospheric spaces.

The focus is Simpson’s painting practice, especially from the mid-2010s onwards, but the exhibition also connects back to her conceptual photography and her long investigation into how images are constructed, fragmented, and made unreliable.

You’ll see works from emblematic series such as Ice, Special Characters, and Earth and Sky, alongside new pieces created specifically for Punta della Dogana. The exhibition moves through unstable landscapes, enigmatic figures, political echoes, Arctic blues, and powerful female presences that seem to appear and disappear at the edge of visibility.

Worth the trip

Because Simpson makes the image feel uncertain — and that uncertainty is the point.

Her work asks: who gets represented? What does memory hide? What does history erase? What happens when beauty carries violence underneath? The paintings are seductive, but never simple. They pull you in with colour, scale and atmosphere, then make you question what you are actually seeing.

At Punta della Dogana, this becomes even stronger. The building sits between the Grand Canal and the Giudecca Canal, surrounded by water, light and reflection. Simpson’s works — full of ice, weather, shadow, bodies and narrative gaps — feel perfectly placed in Venice: a city where images are always unstable.

How to experience it

Don’t try to decode the exhibition too quickly.

Start with the atmosphere: the blues, the cold, the silence, the bodies, the faces, the fragments. Then ask what is missing from each image. Simpson’s power is not only in what she shows, but in what she withholds.

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