fachai At Lorna Simpson’s Show, a Constellation of Galactic and Human History

A reverberating hum in the air, a great rush of wind, a hot, sulfuric smell.

Such was the whirl of sensations that accompanied a meteorite when it landed in Baldwyn, Miss. in 1922, striking the earth just feet from where a Black tenant farmer named Ed Bush was standing. The rock had alighted on farmland owned by Bush’s landlord, a white judge named Allen Cox. Seven years later, an entry on the meteorite was written up in a scientific volume called “Minerals From Earth and Sky,” where Cox is named but Bush, anonymized, is described merely as a “negro tenant who was badly frightened” by the event.

Lorna Simpson encountered this book several years ago and has since remained curious about the stuff-of-legends yet little-known story of Bush’s cosmic encounter. Her show at Hauser & Wirth in Chelsea is a body of work made in response to this bewildering kernel of human-and-galactic history.

Simpson meets the daunting beauty of the celestial sphere with a painterly language of stellar silvers and penumbral grays. At the heart of it she wrestles with a question: How do the hard, constraining realities of Earth — such as the historical obscuring of figures like Ed Bush — face the grand magnitude of that which lies beyond it?

The exhibition, titled “Earth & Sky” (a nod to the geology book), navigates between the temporal and the otherworldly in two series of paintings and a multipart sculptural work. In the first gallery is “Unnatural Constellation,” a set of paintings by Simpson based on a 1960s Ebony magazine spread on gun violence in America. The second gallery features paintings based on depictions of meteorites, including the one that fell at Bush’s feet. Together, they weave a dialogue on force — the forces of gravity and of violence, of the cosmic and the lethal.

ImageLorna Simpson, “Incidental to a fall,” 2024. Acrylic and screenprint on gessoed fiberglass.Credit...via Lorna Simpson and Hauser & Wirth; Photo by James WangImageLorna Simpson, “Haze,” 2024. Acrylic and screenprint on gessoed fiberglass.Credit...via Lorna Simpson and Hauser & Wirth; Photo by James Wang

Simpson, who started painting only about 10 years ago, after wide acclaim during her decades making photo-text works, enters ambitious formal terrain here, reaching new and formidable heights of abstraction. She has flirted with the edge of the abstract before, in landscape paintings like those from “Darkening,” her first solo show at Hauser & Wirth in New York, in 2019.

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Dr. Podwal, who chose dermatology as his specialty because it would give him time to pursue his art, began contributing to The Times’s opinion page when he was a resident at New York University Hospital (now NYU Langone Health). His first cartoon, published after the massacre of 11 Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian terrorists at the 1972 Summer Olympics in Munich, depicted a faceless Israeli runner, blood pouring from an abdominal wound, as he crosses under an ornate, undersize arch bearing words from the Kaddish, the Jewish mourner’s prayer.

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