The 1st at Moderna: Sarah Morris

Having meditated on corporate power in Midtown (1997-99), the gambling and entertainment industry in Neon [Las Vegas], (1998 – 2001) twinned with the film AM/PM (shown at Moderna Museet in What if: Art on the Verge of Architecture and Design, 2000), political power in Capital, (2000 – 2002), and the lifestyle of south Florida as reflected in its swimming pools in Pools [Miami], (2002 – 2003), Morris has in her current body of work turned her attention to the centre of image production.

The film Los Angeles, (which will be screened in the museum’s cinema at the opening) was shot in the days leading up to the 2004 Oscars. It features a cavalcade of A-list actors, directors and producers, providing an inside view of the industry while exploring Hollywood’s narcissism. It is a film about film and a representation of how a city represents itself. As in her previous bodies of works, the Los Angeles film runs parallel to a series of paintings. Morris describes her films as “condensed manifestos” for the paintings and claims that “the films function as an index for every painting I might have made and every painting I might make in the future.”

This exhibition, To Film a Thought in Action, consists of five large canvasses: Department of Water and Power [Los Angeles], Endeavor [Los Angeles], United Talent [Los Angeles], William Morris [Los Angeles], and Cinerama [Los Angeles], the last four were made specifically for this exhibition at Moderna Museet. Although the titles of these five paintings reference specific institutions, they do not necessarily relate to a built architecture. In fact, these latest paintings indicate a slight departure from the previous series of paintings. The grids have become more fragmentary, as if Morris is gently probing her way through the surface of architectural structures and proposing a virtual space.

Sarah Morris’s reading of urban space allows us to glance under the surface while accentuating the way in which architecture structures our lives. She puts her finger on our intuitive relationship to architecture, as well as offering an alternative documentation of our surroundings. Her visual exploration of the urban environment codifies façades and other features of corporate, political and commercial buildings into matrixes of flat blocks of bright colours, using household gloss, and hard-edge grids on square format canvases, hinting at perspective and meanings but leaving us with, as Ronald Jones puts it, a sense that what is significant is what is absent.

Looking at these seductive paintings, it is as if one were caught in an abstracted, distorted vortex of perception. But abstracted? Abstraction in art has traditionally been interpreted as a movement away from figurative representation towards the pure image. However, abstraction can also, according to Martin Prinzhorn, be viewed as a “prerequisite of any representation that communicates content”. In other words, abstraction is a method for the brain, during the process of perception, to make sense of a multitude of impulses. First one sees the structure, and then one moves in on the details. Morris elucidates the way in which we regard space and the way in which we encode the constructed world around us. Prinzhorn claims that the “abstraction in the art of Sarah Morris does not lead away from figuration but, in fact, represents the path that almost leads to it.”

Further reading

Ronald Jones, “Cream and Sugar”. Sarah Morris Capital. Oktagon, 2001.
Martin Prinzhorn, “Almost Abstraction and Sarah Morris”. Parkett, No. 61, 2001, pp.127-133.

Sarah Morris

Born 1967 in London (American)
Lives and works in New York & London
Attended Brown University, Cambridge University and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program.

Latest three solo exhibitions

2005

Los Angeles, Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover, Germany
Endeavor, Palais de Tokyo, Paris
Los Angeles, Galerie Aurel Scheibler, Cologne, Germany

Latest three group exhibitions

2005

Big Bang, Centre Pompidou, Paris
Populism, The Stedlijk Museum, Amsterdam
Extreme Abstraction, Albright Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo NY

Curator: Karen Diamond