Since the late 1990s, artist Sarah Morris has produced a large body of work using both painting and film, which create a new language of place and politics.
Within the framework of the city, Morris’ work plays with social and bureaucratic typologies to implicate occluded systems of control. President Bill Clinton, Chase Bank, Philip Johnson, Robert Towne, the film industry, poster design, the Olympics, the banking system, Oscar Niemeyer, J.G. Ballard, perfume, lunar cycles, pharmaceutical packaging, birdcages and even fruit are all fair game.
Morris’ paintings, known for their distinct use of color, streamline a way of perception as much as a virtual architecture, which is suggested through her titling. In Funcke’s words: “She wants to be both author and protagonist, and to her that means using compromised personalities and places as portals into entanglements of power, generating a sense of dizzying simultaneity that she translates into motives and resources for her paintings and a flow of images for her films, all of which add up to topologies of a moment in the life of power and style.”International solo exhibitions include M Museum, Leuven (2015); Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen (2013); Musée National Fernand Léger, Biot (2012); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2012); Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2009); Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2009); Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel (2008); Palais de Tokyo (2005); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2005); Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Hamburg and Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin (2001); Kunsthalle Zürich, Zurich (2000); Museum of Modern Art, Oxford (1999).Collecting institutions include the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate Modern, London; Victoria & Albert Museum, London; Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; Miami Art Museum, Miami; Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Collection, London and Fondazione Prada, Milan