Sarah Morris
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Sarah Morris (b. 1967) is a British-American artist and film-maker.
Born in the U.K. in 1967, Sarah Morris lives and works in New York and London. She attended Brown University, Cambridge University, and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. She received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting Award in 2001, and in 1999-2000 was an American Academy Award, Berlin Prize Fellow. She has exhibited widely—at Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2006), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2005), Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005), Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2005), Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen (2004), Miami MOCA (2002), Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, D.C. (2002), and Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2001), among others.
Since the mid-1990s, Morris has been internationally recognized for her complex abstractions and films, which are derived from close observation of the architecture and psychology of urban environments. Her works explore contemporary means of communication. Ideas of architecture, both conceptual and visual, provide one vehicle through which she addresses these issues. Morris's films operate between documentary, the biography of a city, and non-narrative fiction; they reference sites of production as well as sites of leisure. She views her films as a parallel activity to her paintings; the latter combine allusions to corporate architecture and pure abstraction to construct a theatrical location at once both critiquing her sources and harnessing their power.
Morris’s main interest has been major American cities, and in all of her films, “Midtown” (New York), 1998, “AM/PM” (Las Vegas), 2000, “Capital” (Washington D.C.), 2001, “Miami”, 2002, and “Los Angeles”, 2004, Morris gives her attention to the special character of these exceptional places. Because of their particular cultural, commercial, and political configurations, the cities’ appearances differ markedly. In the works, Morris treats each city as a self-referential system. The artist creates a montage of scenes from everyday life, distinctive architectural features, and media images that reflect the official image of each city in her filmwork. She arranges these elements in a rhythmically edited sequence. Her work is a visualization of the almost imperceptible interweaving of power and daily urban routine.
Smoothly reflective surfaces, strictly laid-out grid structures, garishly elegant color combinations: through her individual adaptation of the minimalist code, Sarah Morris creates a pictorial space of the urban. In Morris’ painting, one finds the anonymous surfaces of office towers, bank buildings, maps, and city plans. As the abstraction pulls on the viewer like a vortex, one is drawn into the digital game of the grid’s imagined interior.
[edit] References
- Marcus Verhagen, "Nomadism", Art Monthly October 2006
- Tanja Widmann, "To Offer You Something", Texte Zur Kunst, September 2006, pp. 248-251
- Ezra Petronio and Stephanie Moisdon, Bar Nothing by Sarah Morris, Self Service, Issue No.21, Fall/Winter 2004, pp. 302-315
- Gaby Wood, "Cinéma vérité", The Observer Magazine, May 23, 2004, pp. 22-27
- Art Now (25th Anniversary Edition), edited by Uta Grosenick, Burkhard Riemschneider, Taschen, pp. 196-199, 2005
