Lorna Simpson at Hauser & Wirth, London: The Strata of Time and Memory in ‘Previous & Ongoing’
Lorna Simpson returns to London after an eight-year hiatus. Arriving on the heels of the international acclaim garnered by her expansive 2025 painting retrospective at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and her concurrent presentation at Punta della Dogana in Venice, this exhibition brings one of the most commanding chapters of Simpson’s career to Hauser & Wirth’s London galleries. Running from 13 October to 23 December 2026, Previous & Ongoing marks a contemporary zenith for the multi-layered aesthetic she first forged through conceptual photography in the 1990s before transposing it onto canvas in 2014.
Crossing the gallery threshold, one is met by large-scale canvases that appear from a distance like tempestuous fields of abstract colour; draw nearer, however, and the uncanny spectres of history, archival documents, and vintage press clippings begin to surface beneath the paint. Simpson employs out-of-circulation news photographs—unearthed from the Library of Congress, the Associated Press, and Reuters archives, as well as mid-century issues of iconic Black periodicals Jet and Ebony—as the structural armature of each canvas. Possessing what the artist describes as an innate, bizarre absurdity of reality, these archival images are silkscreened onto linen and systematically rebuilt through dense, brooding swathes of acrylic. Beneath these accumulated strata of pigment, the boundary between document and fiction, archive and imagination, dissolves.
The exhibition’s titular piece, Previous & Ongoing (2026), stands as a visual monument to this very sense of historical continuity. By enlarging, fragmenting, and reconfiguring documentary photographs that bore witness to actual events, Simpson leaves the viewer suspended in an unsettling familiarity. Historical records of racial violence and police brutality appear as though wrenched straight from today’s screens, distinguished from the present only by the gritty pixels of their archival source material.
Beside it, Yesterday/Today (2026) pairs billowing clouds of smoke with the silhouette of an inverted volcano—a cinematic metaphor for destruction, social upheaval, and uncontainable fury. Standing before the monumental multi-panel installation Wounded (2026), deep-crimson rivulets of acrylic coursing down the canvas evoke the horror of blood seeping from a bullet wound with stark, abstract urgency. Rather than trading in sensationalism, Simpson channels the physical and psychological residue of violence through the sheer gravity of colour.
Accompanying the paintings are works on paper and sculptural installations composed of cast-glass ‘ice’ blocks—a longstanding motif in Simpson’s visual lexicon that functions as a spatial analogue to frozen memory awaiting thaw. The fraught equilibrium between figuration and abstraction, also sustained in works such as Nightfall, Constellation, and Tiger with star spots, deftly projects the historical presence of the Black body far beyond the confines of Western-centric narratives.
True to its title, Previous & Ongoing is an inquiry into unresolved cases, lingering traumas, and systemic inequities that continually mutate to operate in the contemporary world. In giving voice to the mute photographs of the past at Hauser & Wirth, Lorna Simpson confronts the viewer with a piercing truth: time is no mere linear progression; every unremembered moment remains primed to bleed anew into the present.
