ASPEN, CO.- The Aspen Art Museum presents Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper. Featuring over 100 works—including a new series created during her tenure as the AAM’s 2013 Jane and Marc Nathanson Distinguished Artist in Residence—Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper opens July 26 and will remain on view through September 22, 2013. One of the leading artists of her generation, Lorna Simpson came to prominence in the mid-1980s through photographic and textual works that confronted and challenged conventional attitudes toward race, gender, and cultural memory with a potent mixture of formal elegance and conceptual rigor. Since the late 1990s, Simpson has extended these concerns into a series of film and video installations and large-scale photographic works printed on felt. Lorna Simpson: Works on Paper highlights a more recent body of works on paper that explore the complex relationship between the photographic archive and processes of self-fashioning; many incorporating images of women’s faces (and the occasional male face as well) cut from issues of Jet and Ebony magazines, their hair and suggestion of a torso rendered vibrantly in ink and watercolor and centered on the page. As in Simpson’s earlier works, these new drawings and collages continue to take the African American woman as a point of departure and continue her longstanding examination of the ways that gender and culture shape the experience of life in our contemporary multiracial society.

Lorna Simpson (born 1960, Brooklyn, New York) received her BFA in Photography from the School of Visual Arts in New York and her MFA from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has been widely collected and exhibited by such institutions as The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Studio Museum, Harlem; and Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; among others. In 2006–07, her mid-career survey was exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Miami Art Museum; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Kalamazoo Institute of Arts; and Gibbes Museum of Art in Charleston, South Carolina. Simpson’s exhibition at the AAM coincides with her first major European retrospective at the Jeu de Paume in Paris.

The Aspen Art Museum also opens the first solo presentation of the artwork of Glasgow-based artist Hayley Tompkins in a North American institution. The exhibition will be on view July 26 through September 22, 2013.In her paintings and painted objects, Hayley Tompkins emphasizes the energy found in small things and economical gestures. From sticks and scraps of wood to spoons and mobile-phone casings, her choice of materials insistently calls attention to the boundary between painting and reality. Organized in suggestive and deceptively informal arrangements, Tompkins’s minimal, lo-fi objects highlight the acts of looking, touching, and experiencing space. In so doing, Tompkins prompts the viewer to slow down and attend to their surroundings in a concentrated way decidedly at odds with the pace of contemporary life.

Hayley Tompkins (born 1971, Leighton Buzzard, UK) lives and works in Glasgow. Recent solo exhibitions include Studio Voltaire, London; The Modern Institute, Glasgow; Autobuilding, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh; Re, The Drawing Room, London; and Transfer (with Sue Tompkins) at Spike Island, Bristol, among others. Her work was featured in the 2012 São Paolo Biennial, and has been included in group exhibitions at such venues as Tate Britain; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; and the Hessel Museum at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York. Tompkins is one of three artists chosen to represent Scotland at the 2013 Venice Biennale.