Sarah Morris
13 May - 25 Jun 2011
SARAH MORRIS
Personal Best
13 May - 25 June, 2011
Air de Paris is delighted to present the new solo exhibition by Sarah MORRIS, the third by this internationally recognised artist at Air de Paris. The exhibition title Personal Best is a reference to the 1986 movie written by Robert Towne, to whom Sarah Morris devoted a film in 2006. She has used the film poster as the support for one of the drawings in the exhibition.
In this exhibition Sarah MORRIS is presenting paintings and drawings from her last series, Knots and Clips and John Hancock. In Knots and Clips she has turned to simple office items and their capacity to symbolise such demanding mental operations as establishing connections, liaising and unifying. Devoid of all function, these purely combinatory forms are used to generate intricate motifs in which – despite the pictures' quasi-analytical clarity – form and content are indistinguishable and the colour orchestration heightens the overall complexity. These simple binding structures suggest a transition from enduring utility to contingent organization or text, data and copied material.
A painting from her very last series John Hancock is also presented. Using as a starting point the iconic 1967 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill building, called the John Hancock Center, Morris uses forms reminiscent of the structure of the first multi-use high rise building in America, named for John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance company, a developer and original tenant of the building. The painting also play with the history of John Hancock as the ‘father of the signature’ and the corporatization of Hancock’s signature for Mutual Life. Morris parallels and streamlines the corporatization of Hancock’s signature using her own initials in the new work, invoking a long history of not only industrial design, but also the role of the signature in relation to its confirmation of ownership, agreement to act and validation of artistic work.
Morris's paintings create a form that is continuously splintering and self-generating, and without resolution, creating after-images of capitalism and pre-images of new systems of control. Morris's project, which spans both painting and film, creates a new level of discourse - playing simultaneously architecture, industrial design, entertainment, commerce and politics. Morris portrays, with beguiling perfection, bureaucratic structures of control and networks and the attempt to mask their own power. The infiltration and use of these mainstream forms and the creation of systems of interpretation that are ambivalent and even possibly contradictory is achieved by engaging and investigating moments of failure toward its use and avoidance.
The exhibition will also feature Morris’s film "Points on a Line" (2010). The Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois and the Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut. Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. Curator and architect. Architect and architect. The film documents a shared desire to build structures that might change the way we think about a house, a form and a context. These two buildings were the result of shared ideas and collective desire. But they also complicate ideas of the copy and the original and the chronologies of Modernism. Scrutinising the surface effects their misleading transparency pretends to deny them, Morris turns today's tediously conventional exercises in critical reassessment of the history of modernism into an icily hypnotic visual contemplation free of any apogee. The same is true of Liam Gillick's sound track: pure flux, precise focus on points of detail without losing sight of the line they form, as signalled by the Kandinsky-sounding title.
By carefully documenting the daily maintenance of these two buildings and lingering over the precise placement of the structures in space and of objects within each structure, we are presented with a clear view of places that have gone beyond their initial modest use and become the intersection of a dialogue that was both personal and professional. Morris filmed at both sites over the course of several months, among other locations including The Four Seasons Restaurants, the Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe's infamous Lake Shore Drive, and Chicago's Newberry Library. Morris utilizes The Four Seasons, a place that Philip Johnson practically used as his personal office, as the meeting point between the two architects. Morris’s film is both a record of preservation of two structures and a document of power plays that left a mark in the pragmatic idealism of the late modern period.
Born in 1967, Sarah Morris lives in London and New York. She attended Brown University, Cambridge University, and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. From 1999-2000 she was an American Academy Award, Berlin Prize Fellow and in 2001 Morris received the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting Award. She has widely exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions including the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2009), Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bologna (2009), Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel (2008), the 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). She realized two permanent site–specific artworks in 2010 at the Gateway School of Science in Queens with the architectural firm Pei Cobb Freed and Partners and “Hornet” at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein–Westfalen Museum in Düsseldorf, Germany, which opened in July 2010. She will be realizing two large scale permanent site-specific projects at the Gulating Court House in Bergen, Norway and at the Edward Durell Stone designed Tulsa Convention Center, in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2011.
Personal Best
13 May - 25 June, 2011
Air de Paris is delighted to present the new solo exhibition by Sarah MORRIS, the third by this internationally recognised artist at Air de Paris. The exhibition title Personal Best is a reference to the 1986 movie written by Robert Towne, to whom Sarah Morris devoted a film in 2006. She has used the film poster as the support for one of the drawings in the exhibition.
In this exhibition Sarah MORRIS is presenting paintings and drawings from her last series, Knots and Clips and John Hancock. In Knots and Clips she has turned to simple office items and their capacity to symbolise such demanding mental operations as establishing connections, liaising and unifying. Devoid of all function, these purely combinatory forms are used to generate intricate motifs in which – despite the pictures' quasi-analytical clarity – form and content are indistinguishable and the colour orchestration heightens the overall complexity. These simple binding structures suggest a transition from enduring utility to contingent organization or text, data and copied material.
A painting from her very last series John Hancock is also presented. Using as a starting point the iconic 1967 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill building, called the John Hancock Center, Morris uses forms reminiscent of the structure of the first multi-use high rise building in America, named for John Hancock Mutual Life Insurance company, a developer and original tenant of the building. The painting also play with the history of John Hancock as the ‘father of the signature’ and the corporatization of Hancock’s signature for Mutual Life. Morris parallels and streamlines the corporatization of Hancock’s signature using her own initials in the new work, invoking a long history of not only industrial design, but also the role of the signature in relation to its confirmation of ownership, agreement to act and validation of artistic work.
Morris's paintings create a form that is continuously splintering and self-generating, and without resolution, creating after-images of capitalism and pre-images of new systems of control. Morris's project, which spans both painting and film, creates a new level of discourse - playing simultaneously architecture, industrial design, entertainment, commerce and politics. Morris portrays, with beguiling perfection, bureaucratic structures of control and networks and the attempt to mask their own power. The infiltration and use of these mainstream forms and the creation of systems of interpretation that are ambivalent and even possibly contradictory is achieved by engaging and investigating moments of failure toward its use and avoidance.
The exhibition will also feature Morris’s film "Points on a Line" (2010). The Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois and the Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut. Philip Johnson and Mies van der Rohe. Curator and architect. Architect and architect. The film documents a shared desire to build structures that might change the way we think about a house, a form and a context. These two buildings were the result of shared ideas and collective desire. But they also complicate ideas of the copy and the original and the chronologies of Modernism. Scrutinising the surface effects their misleading transparency pretends to deny them, Morris turns today's tediously conventional exercises in critical reassessment of the history of modernism into an icily hypnotic visual contemplation free of any apogee. The same is true of Liam Gillick's sound track: pure flux, precise focus on points of detail without losing sight of the line they form, as signalled by the Kandinsky-sounding title.
By carefully documenting the daily maintenance of these two buildings and lingering over the precise placement of the structures in space and of objects within each structure, we are presented with a clear view of places that have gone beyond their initial modest use and become the intersection of a dialogue that was both personal and professional. Morris filmed at both sites over the course of several months, among other locations including The Four Seasons Restaurants, the Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe's infamous Lake Shore Drive, and Chicago's Newberry Library. Morris utilizes The Four Seasons, a place that Philip Johnson practically used as his personal office, as the meeting point between the two architects. Morris’s film is both a record of preservation of two structures and a document of power plays that left a mark in the pragmatic idealism of the late modern period.
Born in 1967, Sarah Morris lives in London and New York. She attended Brown University, Cambridge University, and the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. From 1999-2000 she was an American Academy Award, Berlin Prize Fellow and in 2001 Morris received the prestigious Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting Award. She has widely exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions including the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2009), Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bologna (2009), Fondation Beyeler, Riehen/Basel (2008), the 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). She realized two permanent site–specific artworks in 2010 at the Gateway School of Science in Queens with the architectural firm Pei Cobb Freed and Partners and “Hornet” at K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein–Westfalen Museum in Düsseldorf, Germany, which opened in July 2010. She will be realizing two large scale permanent site-specific projects at the Gulating Court House in Bergen, Norway and at the Edward Durell Stone designed Tulsa Convention Center, in Tulsa, Oklahoma in 2011.