International Symposium | Modernism meets Gothic

Angela Stief (Director ALBERTINA MODERN) talks to artist Sarah Morris.

The works of few artists have dealt as intensively with urban infrastructures, social milieus, and the power and powerlessness of architecture as those by Sarah Morris. Her paintings, which refer to unconscious geometries and present themselves as capitalist echoes of consumer and luxury goods, represent cultural typologies. The British-American artist’s films, including her most recent film Sakura (2018), depicts the places of longing of a hypermodern and increasingly digitalized life in urban hotspots, while at the same time addressing the precariousness of social reality on the brink of feasibility. Morris’s entire oeuvre is characterized by the connection between theory and production.

Since the mid-1990s, Morris has been translating modern everyday life, consumerist routines, and the webs of myths and conspiracy theories surrounding cities into abstract, monumental pattern images in bright colors. The New York-based artist engages with people from various walks of life in extensive urban planning and sociological research, as well as countless conversations. The Clips and Rings series, which represent a symbolic coordinate system, portray metropolises as multilayered, contradictory, and complex networks with eroticized surfaces. Public space and industrial work processes become—as the artist explains—retinal afterimages, virtual places that she designs on the computer and then executes in household paint on canvas. One element generates the next in her diagrammatic large formats with a high-gloss finish. The overwhelming aesthetic of the images, which can be envisaged to extend into infinity, conveys to viewers that they are part of a system that is larger than themselves. For her, as the artist emphasizes, there is no periphery, since we are all part of a huge system that devours affirmation and criticism in equal measure.

Thursday, October 13 | 6.00 p.m.
State Rooms at the ALBERTINA museum
Language: English
Free entry | Registration required