Rebecca Morris, Untitled (#02-17) ⏤ detail, 2017, oil and spray paint on canvas
Rebecca Morris
b. 1969 in Honolulu, Hawai, USA
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Lives and works in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Rebecca Morris’s quiet campaign, since the late 1990s, to reinvigorate non-objective abstraction, makes her one of the most singular and important artists of her generation. Her paintings are witty and surprising, sometimes boisterous or irreverent, and sometimes meditative. While they have drawn at various points on such eclectic influences as casino carpeting, terrazzo, neon signage, roof shingles, Wiener Werkstätte, “macramé, ceramics, supergraphics and Suprematism,” as she once wrote, her work never falls into quotation or reference.
Instead, Morris’s painting is distinctly her own. Her identity, her tastes and personal experience are all woven into what she has called “a rolling tumbleweed of collected experiences, best ideas, bad urges, and last-ditch efforts.”
Installation view, Rebecca Morris: 2001–2022, MCA Chicago, Illinois (USA), 2023
If it sometimes seems not to take itself too seriously, it is important to recognize that Morris takes the act of painting very seriously indeed, and has proven as much by her efforts to expand the possibilities for the medium at times (as at the start of her career) when painting was often dismissed as irrelevant or anachronistic. There is nothing ironical in Morris’s work.
Installation view, Rebecca Morris: 2001–2022, MCA Chicago, Illinois (USA), 2023
It was in Morris’s work that one seed of this exhibition germinated: In November 2022, Jonathan Griffin wrote an article for the New York Times about two abstract painters, Morris and Peter Bradley, in which he quoted Liam Everett: “Art should be about nothing, […] It should be an encounter with a U.F.O., an unknown object you have to work out how to come to terms with.” That idea, which applies to Morris’s extraordinary paintings, expanded into this exhibition at Galerie Greta Meert.
Rebecca Morris in her Los Angeles studio, 2020. Photography by Flying Studio. Image courtesy of the artist and Bortolami, New York (USA)