LORNA SIMPSON. Previous & Ongoing
HAUSER & WIRTH is pleased to present Previous & Ongoing, a solo exhibition by Lorna Simpson, in London.
October 13 – December 23, 2026
Drawn to images with an inherent ‘matter-of-fact absurdity,’ Lorna Simpson mines and selects photographs from vintage Jet and Ebony magazines and the archives of the Library of Congress, Reuters and Associated Press. The artist uses these source materials to structure her paintings, beginning each work with silkscreened archival photographs and layering them with acrylics to produce painterly collages. In doing so, she transforms them into layered compositions that blur the boundary between past and present, documentation and fabrication, reality and imagination.
Simpson repeatedly returns to visual records from the past that have resonance in the present day, speaking to the persistence of societal issues such as racial violence and police brutality. Lending its name to the exhibition title, ‘Previous & Ongoing’ (2026) is rooted in documentary photographs that once bore witness to real-life events, which the artist amplifies and reconfigures to draw attention to their jarring, unsettling nature. In ‘Yesterday/Today’ (2026), engulfing smoke plumes are juxtaposed with an inverted volcano, motifs that both invite associations of upheaval and destruction, while the multi-panel work ‘Wounded’ (2026) assimilates drips of acrylic to blood from a gunshot wound.
Throughout her varied subjects, blue is a powerful carrier of meaning for the artist, who uses the color to allude to the nighttime sky, the name ‘blue marble’ for the Earth, the emotional connotations, the history of indigo cultivation and ‘blue black’ culture. The significance of the color is not only conveyed through pigments but occasionally through the titles of Simpson’s paintings, such as ‘Builder Black Blue’ (2026). Adapted from the earlier monochrome collage ‘Los Angeles’ (2019), the triptych ‘Nightfall’ (2026) depicts two singers layered on top of a Prussian blue vista spanning six meters, offering a monumental tribute to the musical blues through both the subject and the artist’s use of color.
Since the beginning of her practice Simpson has spliced together images to create new narratives that emerge from unexpected elements. In the painting ‘Constellation’ (2026), the artist overlays a found group portrait with a star chart rendered in ultramarine, transforming it into an otherworldly configuration. The surreal scene in ‘Tiger with star spots’ (2025) existed as a picture in its own right, which the artist first employed in the collage ‘Beach Walk’ (2023). Depicting a person wearing a tiger mascot head walking down a beach, the artist morphs the figure with a celestial map to amplify its incongruity. ‘Altered & Unaltered’ (2026), the only collage on view, is made up of found images of cats that are combined with female protagonists to create fantastical scenarios while simultaneously imbuing a distinct sense of ambiguity.