Sarah Morris- Interview Magazine
Sarah Morris paints abstract paintings that are made up of bold stark colours and geometric forms, they are very dramatic and cannot be missed.
Morris was born in Kent, England in 1967, and now lives in America. She is well known as an artist and filmmaker. Her films are based on cities or on individuals- she likes to dig deep and discover the architecture, politics and general thinking behind her subjects, be it a city or a person.
In the interview with the Paris based artist Philippe Pareno, Morris talks about her paintings and films.
She explains how contrast the work is in its making, that the paintings are very much planed and made up of maths and diagrams and how slow the process is and presume she is very much on her own, but how in contrast the filming is fast paced, improvised and collaborative.
I like the fact that she uses maths, as the work is so graphic that to sit comfortably on the page, she would need to have it all planned out in some form and maths makes sense. Her work now can look quite digitalised, although when she first produced it, this would have been not that easy, so it shows in a way how she was advanced in her thinking.
As her work is based on the architecture of the cities she chooses to replicate, you have to look deeply into her work, to discover any similarities. It's like trying to work out a puzzle, to see if you can see how she is representing the relevant city with her use of each line and or shape. I would think, that there are a lot of varying definitions to how people see her paintings and Morris herself says, ‘The meaning is changing depending on who’s looking at it.’
Sarah Morris was invited by Art on the Underground to create the twelfth commission at Gloucester Road. Big Ben [2012]
In 2012 she was commissioned to do an art work for Gloucester Road underground station to celebrate the Paralympic Games in London. For this project she chose to portray Big Ben. When you look at the painting you can see the circle representing the clock and the straight lines/paths that could be representing the running tracks, swimming lanes for the Paralympics or even the hands of the clock itself.
Morris, goes onto talk about how her paintings even though they are named after existing places, they are not at all based on the architecture.
She sees her work as more virtual only using the strategies of the architecture, she then goes onto say how she is interested in QR codes, and how to they can bring you specific places or times, she gave as an example, when she went to MoMa to see Picasso.
‘I got a QR code on my receipt. So that code is like a portal bringing me to that place and time. I was thinking that the paintings sort of function like that. They’re my version of a QR code. The paintings are portals. They cite architecture but they aren’t based on specific architecture. I make a painting and call it Revlon Corporation, but it has no direct bearing on the real Revlon corporation.’
This is quite interesting as she sees her work as landmarks, but landmarks that are not actually in situ. They are moveable and represent a place in a way that is not obvious.
Here you can see how her work lends itself to urban cities and as well as representing architecture can be used as part of the architecture itself, and although it stands out it also manages to blend in due to the lines and forms that she has created for the space.
Even with her working being quite hard and stark, due to her use of colour, it is also uplifting and positive.
I also liked the fact how she talked about her work like dominos how one painting will help create the next painting and how this was the same for her in her short films.
I think this is very true for most artists as from each piece of work you do, another thing is discovered. It's like digging a hole but never quite getting to the bottom. Theres always more.
I liked her thoughts on her film in Abu Dhabi, where she explained the huge contrast of the desert with its muted colours to the new city designed by Norman Foster called Masdar. The city will be completely green, and new sources are being developed to eat waste, and where they are looking into how they can produce energy/fuel.
It sounded like how I imagine Los Vegas to be, with the huge tall buildings and bright lights, noise and hundreds of people all at the edge of a never ending isolated desert, once it’s own home.
Her film on cities have no vocals, usually fast paced music and show elements of the city. A real mix of film, that all seem quite random, but are actually very relevant.
From reading the interview, I have seen how Sarah Morris is quite academic about her approach to her work. How each line or footage stands for something or someone, and that even though her work can appear quite random. There is nothing random about it all.
Martin Parr 1952- present
Martin Parr is a British documentary photographer. He is known for his photographic images of people getting on with their lives, be it at the beach, a wedding or an event of some kind. His pictures are quite simple and often made up with primary colours. His photographs do not look like they have been manipulated, although I’m sure he does crop them.
His photographs don’t always have the persons face in, as Parr will have focused on something else of interest.
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The three photographs on this page don’t use the contrast of bright coloursas a lot of his images do, but they are comical. His composition shows a lot going on in the background but your eye is drawn towards the foreground. The one with the seagull and swan has the birds looking at the camera as if the photo is about them and the people just happen to be in the background. The bowls game, has the man pushing out his stomach in a comical way, and the background works as everyone is in white and they all have different ways of standing
These images play on colour, the women on the sun bed is laying down not in the most attractive way. She is lying on a yellow towel and has yellow eye covers. The men on the beach is focused on the yellow football and mans belly. The umbrellas are all different coloursand are mixed up on the image much the same as the people. The women with the deck chair isn’t so much colourfulbut the picture makes me smile as she doesn’t look like she belongs on the beach and the sand and sky and deck chair composition work well togethe
Adrian Ghenie: My Method Is Managing Failure BY LUIZA VASILIU
Adrian Ghenie was born in Baia Mare,Romania in 1977, he was brought up by parents that wanted him to be a doctor, like his dad, and thought art not of any importance, and found it frustrating when he did choose to draw. Ghenie mentions how when he was a 11-14 how he would draw freestyle, which wasn't that successful for him, or he would copy his mums and dads kitsch art hanging in their home, but luckily he had an art that encouraged him to draw and would bring over her albums for him to copy.
He went onto university to study art, lived in Vienna for a bit, then went back home to Romania and started an art gallery for the first in Romania with a friend called Plan B. Here he started painting again and suddenly his work became acknowledged and his work can sell for millions.
Ghenie works with large canvases, and doesn't use a brush, he uses alot of other tools as instruments to lay down his paint. He references artists as well as the tools to apply his painting.
'I've tried to create figurative painting, but using the building bricks of abstract: Pollock-like spraying, some things from Rothko, all those blobs you can see on my recent work which I took from Gorki, areas of decalcomania in the style of Max Ernst, all these are abstract painting tools.'
I feel like his work has a lot of passion and emotion running through it, that he has a lot to say and it all comes out in his work.
His colours appear heavy with a lot of depth and are like waves on a page, going in all different directions. His work is also full of texture and layers, and from the interview he did with LUIZA VASILIU, it is easy to see how textures mean so much to him, how they are part of the of his life, and how he misses them.
'I spent my summers in Constanța, at my aunt's, who lived in a nationalised house, which had belonged to a former Greek shipping magnate, an amazing art-deco house, destroyed by generations of tenants. You just can't imagine how much texture it had and what a fabulous house it was, a mix between Toate pînzele sus! and Grand Budapest Hotel, split up into all sorts of doors and little rooms, where all these people forced in by the communists during the 1950s were living, strange old bags, old whatshername, that drunk, a defrocked priest, such vivid colours… Do you know what's changed since the Eighties? Not just in Romania, everywhere. Textures have been replaced. A superficial, easy-clean world has appeared, mountains of laminate, polystyrene, double-glazing, plastic, we now use spray-on, ready-to-go things. Romania of the 1980s was a hard-to-clean world of textures, it gathered dust. If I go and visit Constanța now, they've replaced everything, they've taken out the old windows and put in double-glazing, they've replaced the old floors which saw 4 or 5 generations with laminated flooring… This changing of texture in the world has led to a change in our behaviour too, the way we look, our hairstyles.'
I particularly like this self portrait, as Ghenie shows it as a collage, then as a painting. I presume the collage came first, but I couldn't find any writing on it, to see exactly what the process was for the final oil on canvas piece. You can see that the basis for the self-portrait is the Van Gough self portrait and he actually calls the collage self portrait Van Gough also. He has done other self portraits like this as well, including one of himself as a Francis Bacon self-portrait.
In this painting you can see two armchairs and a man standing in a suit with a hat. There may also be a rug on the floor by the man. The rest of the image is left to your imagination. Looking at it again, I then saw the back of another man sitting in one of the armchairs, I had totally missed this the first few times I looked at the painting. I presume this is all part of the experience of not knowing what you are seeing, and that every time you look something new will appear. These paintings actually make me feel quite exhausted by just looking at them, and I can imagine they were very draining for Ghenie too in painting them.
When looking at paintings such as this, it tells me that you have to have confidence, in laying down paint and not worrying that it is not working. As long as when I apply the paint, there is a reason for it, that there is a beginning and an ending, then that is enough.