b. 1967 in London, U.K; lives and works in New York, U.S.

Sarah Morris is a multidisciplinary artist, who explores the urban, social, and bureaucratic frameworks that stratify contemporary life. Since the mid-1990s, Morris’s work has focused a critical attention on the physical and psychological spaces of both people and cities. Through the interlinked disciplines of painting and film, Morris creates what she has called a ‘typology’ of experience that gives definition to the political, industrial, architectural and emotional landscape of a given place. The paintings are geometric, hard-edged, and use a bold colour applied in gloss paint. The images produced hover between abstraction and representation and can be simultaneously read as surface design and as multi-dimensional renderings. They are unmistakably architectural, but not explicit. They use motifs, signs, and familiar vistas associated with a particular locale; the colours are drawn from the city and its infrastructure directly. This graphic form of mapping offers insight into the feeling and dynamism of the specific city. The distillation of source material into visual information offers an affective read, with the pulse and personality of the city evoked. Her films cut through to the detail. Deploying a range of cinematic techniques from documentary to more staged and scripted narratives, we are offered insight and proximity to specific characters who we might assume populate the places she paints. Frequently, in the films, we are exposed to the complex machinations of power and influence that motivate the sociality and politics of the subjects depicted. Through intimate portraits and distant panoramas, Morris drills down into the key protagonists and political, and cultural events that have shaped the environments in which we are inscribed as viewers. In doing so, the paintings and films together provide the critical impulse for an exploration of identity, capitalism and power. The work articulates how their complex intersection arrives in the built environments and social infrastructures of a given place and time.

Recent solo exhibitions include Who is Who, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2024); ETC, M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2024); As Slow as Possible, Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich (2023); Pinecones and Corporations, Gallery Hyundai, Seoul (2023); Sakura, Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2023); Means of Escape, White Cube, London (2021); Today we find ourselves at an impasse, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Carpinataria, Rio de Janeiro (2019). Recent group exhibitions include Sweet 16, Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2024); Endeavours and Masterpieces, FRAC Sud - Cité de l’art contemporain, Marseille (2024); The Echo of Picasso, Museo Picasso, Malaga (2023); Positive Fragmentation, Bellevue Arts Museum, Washington (2023); Holy Village II, Derosia Gallery, New York (2023); I Could Eat You, Casa da Cultura Comporta (2022); Peinture: Obsolescence Déprogrammée, Musée de L’Hospice Saint-Roch, Issoudun (2022); An Exhibition With Little Information, Museum of Contemporary Art Busan (2022); There Is Always One Direction, de la Cruz Collection, Miami (2021); Infinite Games... 2, Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2021); Acervo em Transformação [Picture Gallery in Transformation], São Paulo Museum of Art (2020); Remix 2020: Die Sammlung neu sehen, Kunsthalle Bremen (2020) and Das Neue Alphabet (The New Alphabet), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2019).

For further information about this artist please click here.

For Sarah Morris' entry on Asia Art Archive's website please click here.