Sarah Morris: All Systems Fail

The Zentrum Paul Klee is showing the most comprehensive retrospective of the American artist Sarah Morris (b. 1967) to date in Switzerland. The exhibition features one hundred and sixty-six artworks—including fifty-six paintings, drawings, and her immersive film installations—which chart the past thirty years of the artist’s ground-breaking work.

Morris is known for her paintings of graphic geometries which form new understandings of networks, systems, economies, architectures and cognitive perception itself. Through her use of both reality and vivid abstraction, Morris creates a new language of place and politics. She sees her paintings as self-generating, open to interpretation, depicting motion and change, giving the viewer a heightened sense that they are part of a system at large.

Morris draws from the Modernist tradition through her abstract paintings and experimental films while examining the macro- and microstructures of the global situation. Creating a virtual architecture and language of forms, the work incorporates a wide array of subjects ranging from multinational corporations, architecture, generic stem cell technology, Academy Awards, the Olympics, transportation networks, mapping, lunar cycles, museums, printing reproductions, factories of all types, and postal systems to name just a few.

In her original and unique vision of painting, Morris utilizes the pictorial language of post-war pop art, American minimalism and “Op Art.” She is interested in the systems that run through social, political and economic life: from the architecture of big business via traffic to digital infrastructure and the culture industry. Politics and economies are represented through the role of the artist and the use of spectacle in her works. While her paintings might seem abstract, geometrical and thoroughly composed, the surfaces of specific places or companies are mapped using both language and form.

Morris’ films, like her paintings, explore the psycho-geography and economies of cities in flux through their many fragmented narratives and the situation she places herself and camera within. The artist explores the fluid character of place, including metropolises such as Los Angeles, Rio, Washington DC, Miami, Paris and Beijing. The hierarchies we inhabit are the subject matter of Morris’s work. Uniquely playing with the contradiction of our complicity, Morris is considered one of the most intriguing artists of her generation.

The exhibition title recalls the Anthropocene moment; the current widespread pessimism about culture and progress, the digitization of interactions, the failure of political and social structures, and global anxiety about the future. In the present moment marked by rapid change and recognition, Morris’s vision of engagement is overwhelming and ambivalent.

Curators
Martin Waldmeier and Nina Zimmer

Cooperation
The exhibition was organised by the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in collaboration with the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.