Diane Simpson: “Good for Future”

Diane Simpson: “Good for Future”. Untitled. In the mid-198os Chicago-based artist Diane Simpson made a series of drawings, rolled them up, and wrote a note to herself: "good for future.” The drawings, which borrowed motifs from architecture and design that Simpson had recently seen in Japan, then sat in her studio for the next several decades. True to that earlier promise, Simpson has translated those ideas into the sculptures on view here, initiating a conversation with her past self., For more than 50 years, Simpson's conversion of preparatory drawings into complex sculptures has been marked by a twist: While a 45-degree angle on a page usually conveys 90 degrees in space, Simpson employs that same 45-degree angle in the sculpture itself. This results in a flattened perspective, as if the three-dimensional volume is reverting to its two-dimensional source-folding and unfolding before the viewer., Throughout her career Simpson has drawn inspiration from a wide range of visual sources, including the structure of clothing, utilitarian objects, and architectural elements, creating sculptures that are human scaled, spatially challenging, and wonderfully strange. Merging past and present, Diane Simpson: "Good for Future" places Simpson's architectonic forms in dialogue with the Chicago skyline in the artist's inaugural presentation of outdoor sculpture.,

This exhibition is organized by the Art Institute of Chicago with major funding from the Bluhm Family Endowment Fund, which supports exhibitions of modern and contemporary sculpture., All works are by Diane Simpson (American, born 1935), courtesy of the artist, Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago, James Cohan Gallery, New York, and Herald St., London