In Bottega Veneta’s third year at Punta della Dogana, Lorna Simpson brings archival portraits and glacial-blue landscapes to Venice.

Just steps away from the water in Venice, we’re looking at ice. Inside Punta della Dogana, deep-blue landscapes meet faces cut from vintage magazines and traces of photographs taken decades ago. Some figures barely emerge through layers of paint; others have almost disappeared. Lorna Simpson’s Third Person marks the third chapter of Bottega Veneta’s collaboration with the Pinault Collection. Following Pierre Huyghe and Thomas Schütte, the galleries now belong to Simpson’s world of photographs, paintings, and archival fragments.

Curated by Emma Lavigne, Third Person brings together approximately 50 works spanning more than two decades of the artist’s practice. Reimagined for Venice following Source Notes at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2025, the exhibition pays particular attention to her recent paintings. Behind these monumental canvases, however, lies a habit Simpson developed long before she began working at this scale: collecting images, holding onto them, and returning to them years later.

Her collection of vintage Ebony and Jet magazines offers a glimpse into that process. Fashion editorials, advertisements, and portraits are removed from their original contexts and given unfamiliar company. In Unanswerable (2018), a series of forty collages, a woman holds two lightbulbs. Apart from the profile of another woman added to her face, the photograph remains almost untouched. One small alteration is enough to change the entire image. Spend a little longer with Simpson’s collages and strange, sometimes humorous, sometimes unsettling details begin to interrupt the immaculate poses of another era.

Moving from these intimate images to the large-scale paintings, the colours deepen and the proportions shift. Across Ice, Special Characters, and Earth and Sky, fragments of photographs, human silhouettes, and historical landscapes are buried beneath blues and greys. Simpson’s Arctic scenes might initially suggest the stillness of nature photography, yet many draw from the archives of historical expeditions. Beneath their seemingly uninhabited surfaces are traces of people whose presence was rarely given the same attention as the landscapes themselves.

In Three Figures (2014), that relationship with history becomes more immediate. The work draws on archival photographs of civil rights protesters being attacked with fire hoses in Birmingham in 1963. Three figures, holding tightly to one another, are barely visible through the black ink. Several panels fall out of alignment, introducing another fracture into an already violent image. What Simpson brings forward is not a distant historical document. The force of the photograph remains difficult to ignore.

Elsewhere, sound enters the galleries. Vibrating Cycles (2026), an installation of singing bowls arranged across the floor, invites visitors into the work, while Cloudscape (2004), screened in a small, dark room, offers a quieter encounter. In the black-and-white film, artist and musician Terry Adkins stands whistling as fog gathers around him. Eventually, he disappears completely. The sequence then reverses, and Adkins slowly returns. The faces Simpson rearranges in her collages find a different parallel here, disappearing and reappearing before our eyes.

Looking back at Bottega Veneta’s three years at Punta della Dogana, it’s striking how different these same galleries have appeared. In 2024, Pierre Huyghe’s Liminal filled the space with darkened installations exploring human and non-human existence. Matthieu Blazy, then creative director of Bottega Veneta, collaborated with Huyghe on costumes for Idiom. The following year, Thomas Schütte’s Genealogies brought bronze figures, ceramic heads, and glass sculptures into the building. Simpson’s paintings and collages introduce another visual language to the third year of the partnership.

Through the expansive windows of the historic building redesigned by Tadao Ando, the Venetian lagoon remains in view. Inside are frozen landscapes, altered portraits, and stacks of old magazines beneath glass blocks. The images Simpson has collected over the years have travelled far from the stories they originally belonged to. Yet something of those earlier lives remains, enough to make us look twice.

Lorna Simpson: Third Person is on view at Punta della Dogana, Venice, until November 22, 2026.

Arts & Culture