Expo Chicago 2025: Diane Simpson

Press Release

Corbett vs. Dempsey is pleased to present a solo booth featuring a selection of historical prints by Diane Simpson. Created over a period from the mid 1970s to the early 1980s, most of these extraordinary works on paper have never been exhibited. Deploying various techniques including collagraphy and collage, the works' images consist of some of the same types of forms Simpson would explore over the subsequent five decades: architectural shapes and ideas drawn from women's clothing. The earliest prints are uncommonly vivid, later ones more subdued, in browns, blue, and grey tones. Made in tiny editions, some in fact unique, these printworks allude directly to the artist's work in three dimensions; one of them was designed to be cut out and folded into a kind of origami sculpture.

Diane Simpson (b. 1935) is one of the great artists to emerge from the Imagist period of Chicago art, however, although she studied with Ray Yoshida and was dear friends with Barbara Rossi and Christina Ramberg, she was not herself an Imagist. Her earliest shows were at the legendary Phyllis Kind Gallery, and she has continued to make all her work in her studio in Wilmette. Simpson will be the subject of a major retrospective starting in 2026 at the Sara Hildén Museum in Tempere, Finland, traveling to Mumok in Vienna, Austria in 2027. In October of this year, on its Bluhm Terrace, the Art Institute of Chicago will present Simpson's first ever exhibition of outdoor sculpture.