Libido of the Forest — Mary Simpson

Mary Simpson
Libido of the Forest

November 29, 2018 – January 6, 2019
SITUATIONS, New York, NY

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Libido of the Forest presents a new body of work by Mary Simpson. A daily practice of drawing flowers over the past two years evolved into her most representational paintings to date, taking inspiration from the paintings of Joan Mitchell, Cy Twombly and Georgia O’Keeffe, as well as the feminist science fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and the ancient Egyptian art that flourished under the female Pharaoh Hatshepsut. Simpson’s pastel and ink drawing Libido of the Forest (after Paul Klee), 2018, was inspired by a painting Klee made in 1917, while he was serving in World War I. The exhibition also includes a photograph taken in 1917 by Simpson’s great-grandmother of a wild snow-covered forest near the Matanuska-Susitna Valley in Alaska, where Simpson
grew up. Several small drawings in pastel and ink depict flowers in bold colors and sensual lines, while three 28-by-42-inch paintings in oil on canvas elevate the flowers to larger-than-life scale.