Art in America
Hyperallergic
The New York Times

JTT is pleased to present “Point of View,” a solo exhibition by the Chicago-based artist Diane Simpson (b. 1935, Joliet, IL). This will be her second show of all new work in New York since her debut with the gallery in 2013, and follows the gallery’s 2016 presentation of her historical “Samurai” series. For her newest sculptures the artist draws on a range of architectural sources, as well as her own personal archive of drawings from the early 1980s.

Architecture has long been a source of inspiration for Simpson’s constructions, serving to inform everything from her drawings and prints in the early 1970s through her ongoing costume forms. Her work has often referred to the Art Deco period and other experimental architectural styles, examples of which can be found across the Chicago cityscape as a result of the skyscraper boom in the early 20th century. In her latest body of work, features of the built environment become her primary references. Here, the sources range in style and geographical origin from Art Nouveau facades in Prague and Leipzig, Germany, Shinto shrines in Ise, Japan, the former Women’s City Club in St. Paul, MN, New York City townhouse windows and Art Deco fixtures in Vienna. Most were photographed by the artist, and each selected with an eye towards their formal qualities including pattern, shape, and the relationship between structural parts.

Simpson’s translations of these architectural features vary in degrees of abstraction from the original photographic source, reducing ornamental accents while amplifying curves and geometric forms, material qualities and formal contrasts. In Bannister (Vienna) for example, the work which most closely resembles its source, floating gridded panels and their connective hardware accentuate its oblique angles. And in Transom (with Tassels) the decorative facade is rendered at, calling attention to its ovular portal and sloping curves which the artist carefully constructed from MDF using a series of bevel cuts. Attention to the surface detail balances a formal geometry in Grained Chimney where Simpson has traced the grain of its wooden planes in graphite, throwing the jagged, looping natural pattern of the wood into high relief.

Much has been written about Simpson’s process of transcribing her photographic sources into technical drawings on graph paper using axonometric projection. These drawings become the basis for her final sculptures which often realize the two-dimensional perspectival distortions in three dimensions. For three freestanding works in this exhibition, Simpson revisited several of her earliest drawings executed shortly after developing this process in the years following the completion of her MFA (1979). Two Point Enclosure, Grained Chimney, and Roof Shape (Ise), are based on plans for sculptures that Simpson originally drafted in 1980. The latter two works are realized here for the first time, while the former is a reconstruction from a never-exhibited corrugated cardboard original. Recently, works from this early period were the subject of “Cardboard- Plus, 1977-1980,” a solo show at Wesleyan University’s Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery. A forthcoming book based on that exhibition will feature previously unpublished artworks and be released this fall.

In 2020 Diane Simpson’s first institutional solo exhibition in Europe featuring four decades of work was mounted by the Nottingham Contemporary. She was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial and in 2015 the ICA Boston presented a survey of work from the 1980s to the present. She is a 2019 Anonymous Was a Woman grantee and in 2018 she received a research grant from the Graham Foundation to support her project Architecture in Motion commissioned by FD13 Residency for the Arts in Minneapolis-Saint Paul, Minnesota. Her work is in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Art Institute of Chicago; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; MWoods, Beijing, Illinois State Museum, Springfield, IL; Racine Art Museum, Racine WI; Rockford Art Museum, Rockford IL; James R. Thompson Illinois Center, Chicago; Samek Art Gallery, Bucknell University, Lewiston, PA; Perez Art Museum, Miami; Kadist Foundation, Paris and San Francisco, and Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland.