NYAB Event - Rebecca Morris Exhibition

Rebecca Morris Exhibition

Harris Lieberman

This event has ended.

Morris’s “perverse formalism” mixes direct paint handling and strikingly bold forms. Since leaving school in 1994 for an art world largely indifferent to abstract painting, Morris has mined an intensively personal, uncanny visual language. The conversation has shifted, in the interim, to focus on resurgent modes of abstract painting, and with it comes greater understanding of Morris’s paintings, which confidently toe the art-historical and the everyday, the “old school/new school,” of abstraction. In her personal manifesto “For Abstractionists and Friends of the Non-Objective” Morris gives ideological heft to the hard-won and unconventionally beautiful visual language that makes her such a singular painter in the field.

Over a series of large, predominantly square canvases on view in the gallery, Morris runs the gamut of painterly techniques, interlocking jig-jag fields of diluted oils, in one work, with a Constructivist-by-way-of-Memphis bravado; and in other paintings, dialing down the painterly excess to let her grids and swarms jitter about on spare grounds. Morris customarily makes her paintings on the floor of her studio atop a canvas working tarp – a method that contributes to the grit and tactility of her surfaces. One such tarp has been repurposed for this show as a backhanded painting, and its accumulated marks and splotches have been stained and set in relief by a thick field of silver spray paint. Though the silver divides the tarp into triangles and polygons, under the aegis of geometric abstraction, the effect is far stranger than expected. Stumbling out of their ideological frame, Morris’s canvases uncover new and fertile routes for abstract painting.