Sarah Morris creates heroic geometric paintings that derive their architectonic forms from specific urban environments.Sarah Morris creates heroic geometric paintings that derive their architectonic forms from specific urban environments. In earlier bodies of work, Morris abstracted the buildings of Midtown Manhattan, Las Vegas and Washington, DC A new show of eight large canvases, all painted with household glos was inspired according to the city of Miami. Morris also bring into beings short films and photographs of each metropolis she examines. This imagery typically functions as a visual archive, allowing Morris to distill certain colors and perspectives for use in her paintings. Nine like photographs (all works 2003) were displayed at the entrance to the gallery and exhibited impressionistic glimpses of life in Miami. any of the pictures, like those of women swimming and sunbathing, are obvious images of tropical leisure. Others resist geographic specificity, as does a close-up of Diet Coke bottle in a plastic carton. Collectively titled "Color Referent (Miami):' the photographs contain passages of aqua in the blues lemon yellow, melon pink and other striking colors that reappear in the paintings. Morris continues to paint precise, hard-edge grids that appear to retire into space according to the masterships of linear perspective. But while her paintings of strange York and Las Vegas move oblique, exterior views of skyscrapers and casinos, the Miami works be warmed more contained, as if the artist were painting inside subterranean chambers. The titles help explain this interiority at suggesting that hotel swimming lakes not architectural elevations, are the focus of this investigation of the urban scene In pond s Nassau Suite (Miami), a grid of brown white and aqua rectangles rises sharply in the foreground before receding along a raised plane, as if to distinguish the sagacious and shallow ends of an devoid of contents swimming pool. A similar compass is excavated in Pools, hundred (Miami), where bright yellow orthogonals pluck the viewer inside a unfathomable cubic space tiled with black, gray and pink squares. Other works are les coherent and contrast logical spatial recession with irregular geometric shapes that emphasize the painted surface. In puddles The Tides (Miami), for example, a lime verdant grid imposes a distinct horizontal plane well "within" the painting, while numerous crisscrossing diagonals break the interval of the canvas into two-dimensional shards of aqua, pink, mauve and tangerine. This prismatic treatment may describe rays of light penetrating water or colorful reflections of the surrounding city playing in succession the surfaces of its ubiquitous and emblematic swimming pools COPYRIGHT 2004 Brant Publications, Inc. |
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