Ivan Morley Exhibition

Bortolami

poster for Ivan Morley Exhibition

This event has ended.

Bortolami presents the gallery’s first solo exhibition with Ivan Morley.

Morley has created and recreated the same paintings for over a decade. By repeating the themes and images, he builds works of art—which he refers to as “groups”—consisting of large numbers of individual paintings. Yet, his first show at Bortolami marks a significant shift in his art-making. Morley has applied a unifying strategy to his disparate practices for the first time, by using the pattern produced by breaking a large pane of glass to “draw” all the works in the show, whether they are made of painstakingly tooled leather, thread, batik, or oil paint.

Whereas his work over the last decade used repetition to play with temporal experience and sequence, the paintings in this exhibition use similar means to a different end. By making the same image six times from a variety of materials, Morley manufactures a present tense. One might argue that his practice and notion of time is vertical rather than linear.

The titles, A True Tale and Tehachepi, (sic), refer to two of a handful of anecdotes that Morley has painted many times over. The former involving an enterprising ex-slave who made a fortune taking advantage of the overabundance of cats in one city and of rats in another. The latter; a native family living in a small town where the wind was so strong it could alter a bullet’s trajectory. But the precise subject, origin, or narrative of each tale is hardly the point. Rather, he renders elements along each story’s periphery, allowing a single detail to shift and mutate via paint and thread.

Likewise, the scale of these works is determined by not just exhaustion but practical necessity—sometime he simply runs out of time and material. The two embroidered canvases consist of solid, vaguely geometric forms that transition abruptly between one another. The repetitive action of each stitch, akin to cross-hatching in a drawing, serves as both catharsis and productive, impulsive activity.

Media

Schedule

from September 10, 2015 to October 24, 2015

Opening Reception on 2015-09-10 from 18:00 to 20:00

Artist(s)

Ivan Morley

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