Sarah Morris

Sarah Morris (born 20 June 1967 in Sevenoaks, Kent, England) is an American and British artist. She lives in New York City in the United States.

Personal life and education

Morris was born in Sevenoaks, Kent, in south-east England, on 20 June 1967. She attended Brown University from 1985 to 1989, Cambridge University, and the Independent Study Program of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1989–90. She was a Berlin Prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin in 1999–2000; in 2001 she received a Joan Mitchell Foundation painting award. She was married to Liam Gillick.

Work

Morris works in both painting and film, and considers the two to be interconnected.

From about 1997 her paintings were geometric Modernist grid designs with flat planes of colour; a related series was of glass-faced skyscrapers with geometric landscape designs reflected in their façades. Among her earlier painting styles were screen-prints reminiscent of Andy Warhol, word-paintings, and paintings of shoes.

Morris' films have been characterized as portraits that focus on the psychology of individuals or cities. Her films about cities, like Midtown, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Rio depict urban scenes, capturing the architecture, politics, industry and leisure which define a specific place. Other films describe a place through the viewpoint of an individual, like psychologist Dr. George Sieber describing the terrorist event at the Olympic Stadium in Munich in the film 1972 or the industry politics of Hollywood from the viewpoint of screenwriter and producer in the eponymous film Robert Towne.

Exhibitions

She has shown internationally, with solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2001), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2005), Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2008), Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2009), Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2009), and Musée National Fernand Léger in Biot (2012).

She has created site-specific works for various institutions including the Lever House, Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen Museum, Düsseldorf, Germany, the lobby of UBS in New York City and the Gloucester Road tube station in London.

Morris' films have been featured at the following:

• Ullens Center for Contemporary Art in Beijing (Entire filmography),
• Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris (Strange Magic),
• Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago (Chicago),
• Sotheby's in New York (Points on a Line),
• Barbican Centre in London (Beijing, Midtown),
• Guggenheim in New York (Midtown, AM/PM, Capital, Miami, Los Angeles),
• Centre Pompidou (Midtown, AM/PM, Capital, Miami, Los Angeles).

Public collections

• Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
• Berardo Collection, Sintra, Portugal
• British Council, London
• Centre d’Art Contemporain, Le Consortium, Dijon
• Centre Pompidou, Paris
• Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York
• Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas
• Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris
• F.R.A.C. Bourgogne, Dijon
• F.R.A.C. Poitou-Charentes
• Government Art Collection, London
• Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
• Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen
• Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg
• Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
• Miami Art Museum
• Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris
• Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
• Museum of Modern Art, New York
• Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt
• National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C.
• Sammlung DaimlerChrysler, Berlin
• Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam
• Tate Modern, London
• UBS Art Collection, New York
• Yale Center for British Art, New Haven
• Victoria and Albert Museum, London

Filmography

• Midtown (1998)
• AM/PM (1999)
• Capital (2000)
• Miami (2002)
• Los Angeles (2004)
• Robert Towne (2006)
• 1972 (2008)
• Beijing (2008)
• Points on a Line (2010)
• Chicago (2011)
• Rio (2012)
• Strange Magic (2014)
• Abu Dhabi (2016)
• Finite and Infinite Games (2017)
• Sakura (2019)

Other activities

• Americans for the Arts, Member of the Artists Committee

Origami lawsuit

In 2011 Morris was sued by a group of six origami artists, including American Robert J. Lang. They alleged that in 24 works (eventually discovered to be 33 or more) in her "Origami" series of paintings Morris had without permission or credit copied their original crease patterns, coloured them, and sold them as "found" or "traditional" designs. The case was settled out of court early in 2013; under the terms of the settlement, the creators of the crease patterns are to be given credit when the works are displayed.

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References

Further reading