Arts and Letters

Diane Simpson (b. 1935, Joliet, IL) isolates fragments of the everyday—the turn of a collar, the flounce of an apron pocket, a building facade—and transforms them into sculptures that exist between the familiar and the uncanny.

Working from photographs she has collected over decades, Simpson develops each piece through meticulous axonometric drawings on graph paper, using 45-degree angles to flatten three-dimensional forms before reconstituting them as sculptures that retain those same geometric distortions. Her drawing system has its roots in the spatial perspectives of medieval paintings, Persian miniatures, and Japanese scrolls, creating what she calls a “bird’s-eye view that results in a very immediate presence.”

Her material vocabulary draws from the hardware store and the domestic realm—corrugated board, medium-density fiberboard, aluminum, brass, linoleum, and galvanized steel, alongside everyday fabrics like linen, leather, and mesh. Using a jigsaw, router, and other tools and innovative sculptural techniques, she painstakingly handcrafts each work, developing methods to meet the needs of different pieces and materials. Part of the transformation involves playful shifts of scale—her works always reference the body through clothing or architecture, “the subject of the body without the body,” as she puts it, but their proportions are often surprising. “Things happen when I construct the form that I can't anticipate,” she explains, describing how this distinctive process distances her sculptures from their sources.

This exhibition, Simpson’s first solo institutional show in New York, presents thirty works from 1976 to 2022 across two galleries. One gallery features her drawings and early collagraph prints, while the other includes sculptures that span her evolution from cardboard works and clothing-based sculptures to recent architectural forms, all unified by her rigorous yet intuitive approach to transformation.

Arts and Letters commissioned an essay, “The Steel Curve of Adornment,” by Audrey Wollen, which accompanies the exhibition as part of our Reader series.

Arts and Letters will host an opening celebration for the exhibition on Saturday, September 27, from 4 to 7pm. All are welcome. Please let us know if you plan to attend here.

Formal Wear is organized by Kristin Poor, Curator. Support for the exhibition is provided by members of Arts and Letters. Special thanks to Corbett vs. Dempsey, Chicago; James Cohan Gallery, New York; and the lenders to the exhibition: James Keith Brown and Eric Diefenbach, New York; Victoria Lautman, Los Angeles; the Miller Meigs Collection; and Bonnie and Joe Stanfield, Chicago.