Met failed to honor Lorna Simpson as an exceptional painter

Lorna Simpson panels attract you directly, as their rich blue tones are washed like a garbage wave. From afar, her biggest paintings, which are about 10 feet length, can look cold, even a little harbinger, but when accurate examination, they provide a lot of what he admires. You can marvel at the perception of these works – their extra drops and strokes that a wiper made.

But it seems that these surfaces are hiding more than they reveal. In some sections of her paintings, she included tapes of the unprecedented text or barely visible images of women’s eyes, and they stare at their appearance in a mirror way. These details make their work attractive. I still return to a blue cloud of smoke or fog at the Diptych angle By Beril Wright (2021), and I am still thinking that I see the most likely mouth, smile in fog. It is the mysterious quality that makes its paintings a sign.

By Beril WrightDeotified to the late coordinator who defended Simpson’s work early, is one of more than 20 paintings at the first exhibition to direct Simpson in this way. These paintings extend for a contract of production, between 2014 and 2024, and are displayed until November 2 in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, in a show entitled “Source Notes”, a reference to the reference images that are active. The exhibition aims to provide a general overview of its official practice, while also linking it to its combined works.

Despite working as a painter for a while now, Simpson is still known as the photographer. Her name was made in the eighties of the last century with works that married black women with hidden texts. These works force viewers to question their pre -concepts while revealing what they mean completely. Thus, when Simpson first launched her 2015 Biennial of Venice Biennial, organized by her friend, the late Coordinator OKWUI Enwezor, was a surprise to some. The Met exhibition explains that these works were just a continuation of what began in photography.

The exhibition successfully achieves the goal of showing how to inform her of what her paintings mentioned – showing that there is liquidity between the two practices. But the show does not feel big enough or comprehensive enough to make the Simpson issue as a wonderful painter. Museum exhibitions always leave a lot on the floor of the cut room, but in this case, it does so with taxes for the survey.

This small collection of huge paintings looks narrow, without the room for breathing. The choice of the works carried out by coordinator Lauren Rosati is random. There is only one work, for example, from a series of meteorites that were recently displayed in Hauser & Wirt, in one of the most important New York exhibitions in her paintings so far. This work, Have you turned the time? (2024), from MET MET holdings; It also happens to be less interesting than the group.

The catalog contains pictures of works that are more useful examples of practicing them than what is shown in exhibitions. One of the explanations, of course, spatial restrictions: Simpson’s offer is much smaller, for example, from a great exhibition of John Singer Sargent (in full view of the upper showrooms on the upper floor until August 3). This talks about Met priorities. Fortunately, this will be the last Met Mounts exhibition in this space, preparing to build on the $ 500 million ting suite, although this will not open for another five years.

Simpson is completely worth a show that can take it seriously as a painter, but the MET offer failed. Its primary concentration is on wiping its use in blue and showing the huge range of paintings, however it is not very convincing in this way. I found myself attracted to more modest works like Note the ghost (2021), which is characterized by a black square to one side. Signs indicate the history of black art and culture in Oeuvre’s Simpson, and Kazimir Malevich’s hint Black Square (1915) clear. However, Simpson sees these “black boxes”, because she loves to call it, as “a memory container, … the professor’s book to keep the past and reliable discrimination,” according to Rosati’s article in the Catalog. That these containers are filled and add to a large extent this metaphor: What and how do we remember – and to what extent? It indicates that the painting is relatively small compared to the rest indicates that this work can be easily overlooked.

The best painting in Simpson remains its first invasion in the middle, Three numbers (2014). Here, three numbers are extracted in the middle of this composition from a famous image in 1963, which depicts high -pressure water hose that is converted to civil rights activists in Birmingham, Alabama. Ben Day’s visible points and marble -like seminars add black and white to the dignity of the paintings. The most interesting, Simpson has been compensated for the three right panels and broke the associated weapons chain. You can see the promise of her experience – and the feeling that this artist has made a great axis and has already pulled it.

Simpson used this approach to manufacturing and stripping history again Detroit (poem to G.)12 panels from 2016 hanging next to it Three numbers In Met. One of the source pictures is the Detroit uprising in 1967. Something happened here, but what? The city may be burning. Memory fog may have been the scene.

But in the hands of Simpson, the violence has not been repeated – it is extracted, albeit in a way that turned from the most brutal moments of history. Using it for multiple panels is important. It creates a mixed experience in which the memory is cloudy and flat. There are black lines, as if these images are only partial. Some painful memories never gather, just like Simpson’s panels.

Its exploration of history grows in the works that come after that, because it is reference that itself is mysterious and well -known. Each of her paintings “ice” and Nazia hinted to a known history of black men whose contributions have been erased in science, both large and small, at one time, to be revived recently. The “ICE” series, which includes pictures of Arctic Vistas, refers to Matthew Hinson, an African American explorer that discovered the geographical pole in 1909, but his discovery was largely attributed to the white leader on the trip, Robert Peri. The work of the meteorite refers to Ed Bush, a black rented farmer who discovered a meteorite in 1922 in Mississippi, but his name was not mentioned in the account that was discovered; The white owner thanked the farm, Allen Cox, in the historical record for discovering him while falling at home.

The only only painting in MET, Have you turned the time?Stone sizes that weigh less than a pound of more than 10 feet. As the leading things went, the stone was minimal, but Simpson presented it on the scale of history. In diving into the archive, as collage may do, Simpson is able to extract the essence of these stories, which indicates that although they looked slim, it is already important. The paradox in MET is that it achieves the opposite: it has a feeling that it is a major offer, but it reduces work.