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Diane Simpson

Biography

Diane Simpson - Artists - James Cohan

Portrait of Diane Simpson for PIN-UP via Topical Cream

For over four decades, Chicago-based artist Diane Simpson has created rigorously constructed sculptures originating from clothing, furniture, utilitarian objects, and architectural sources. Attentive to the formal qualities of these vernacular references, Simpson playfully oscillates between two and three dimensional space by translating her subjects to schematic drawings and then, using the same tricks of pictorial illusion, transforming them back into actual space. The results are curiously flattened three dimensional versions of familiar objects rendered in a wide range of materials, from linoleum to perforated metal.

Diane Simpson (b. 1935) has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Nottingham Contemporary (2020), Wesleyan University (2020), MCA Chicago (2016), ICA Boston (2015), and the Chicago Cultural Center (2010), among others. Simpson has been featured in shows that include the Whitney Biennial (2019); The Making of Husbands at KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin (2019); Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950-2019 at The Whitney Museum, New York, NY (2019); Objects Like Us at The Aldrich, Redding, CT (2018); Grey Matters at the Wexner Art Center, Columbus, OH (2017); and Unorthodox at the Jewish Museum, New York, NY (2015), among others. 

Her artwork is in the permanent collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland; Hessel Museum of Art, Annandale-on-Hudson, NY; ICA Boston, MA; Jewish Museum, New York, NY; Kadist Art Foundation, Paris, France; MCA Chicago, IL; and the Pérez Art Museum Miami, FL, among others.

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