Since the mid-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.

Morris’ paintings and films contain elements that complement and connect to one another, generating a constant back-and-forth play between the two. In her paintings, she uses colors and geometries that she associates with a city’s unique aesthetic vocabulary and palette, as well as its character and multiple histories. Within the framework, Morris’ work plays with social and bureaucratic typologies to implicate obstructive systems of control. In her films 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.

In writer Bettina 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.”

— Submitted by the artist’s studio