BOOK:Lorna Simpson-Revised & Expanded Signed Edition, Phaidon Publications

In the revised and expanded Lorna Simpson monograph by Phaidon Publications, covers Simpson’s early years, her breakthrough moment in 1993, when she became the first African-American woman ever to show in the Venice Biennale and the first to have a solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; right through to her work in recent years, when she has collaborated with Rihanna and received the prestigious J.Paul Getty Medal. The artist recalls the first work of art she can remember seeing. “My parents had an appreciation of Modernism and Minimalism, particularly abstract painting, so therefore I had an appreciation of this too,” the New York artist explains to her interviewer, Thelma Golden, the Director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York. “They had these reliefs on the wall: 1960s ceramic plaques with jazz musicians. They were black and white – a black ground with the relief area, the contours, in white. And stylistically they were near-abstract. I remember looking at them for years, and recall the moment when I suddenly realized, ‘Ah, it’s a jazz musician!’ I was a little disturbed by that”. The simple decoding the work bothered that nascent artist. “Whenever I discovered realism within something that I’d thought was abstract, it was a little unnerving to me,” she says. “I also remember deciphering in a little reproduction of Picasso’s Three Musicians (the dog under the table), and that completely changed it for me, and made it less interesting”. Dimitris Lempesis