Mali Morris has been exploring the possibilities of abstract painting for over 50 years. Her recent paintings create visual arenas, where colour moves through space and space moves through colour. Glowing circles call to each other through painted structures that are both fluid and geometric. Opacity and translucency are important, as are the ways the touch of a brush or other implements can open up a painting’s virtual depth. Freedom, ease, pleasure and wit co-exist with rigour and decisiveness.
Morris’ earlier work belongs to a painterly tradition including Abstract Expressionists such as Hans Hofmann, Adolf Gottlieb, Gillian Ayres and Helen Frankenthaler, that itself developed from the example of earlier modernists including Milton Avery, Albert Marquet and Henri Matisse. “Calling” features paintings by Morris from the past 25 years. Morris’s Clearings paintings, begun at the end of the 1990s, mark a break from the tradition of gestural abstraction, setting the stage for her work up to the present. In the Clearings Morris worked by removing (or “clearing”) layers of paint to reveal previously painted layers below. These works allowed Morris to achieve new ways of structuring pictoral space in her work, to find the luminosity she searches for.
One of the early Clearings, Pink Blue Cleared (1999) is amongst the most simplified paintings Morris has ever made, while Peeps (2005-6) shows the Clearings moving to a greater complexity. Morris painted over the irregular patchwork of saturated colour of a failed painting, adding and removing paint in controlled yet impulsive gestures until she achieved a lively balance between the field of creamy striations and the orbs of pink and yellow that float ambiguously within it. Flotilla (2007) makes the underlying grid of Peeps explicit and shows her employing the spatial ambiguities of the Clearings at a more public scale: the circles positioned within Flotilla appear suspended at different depths from the picture surface and are drawn to and repelled from each other by hard-to-gauge tensions; yet the overall result is clear and luminous. After 2014 Morris moved away from the premises of the Clearings, extending their lessons while continuing to rethink her visual language. The lively checkerboard colour of Second Stradella (2014) merges a grid and a spiral motif in a manner reminiscent of Matisse’s famous The Snail (1953). Crossing (2014) and Line Dancer (2016) return a more direct form of gesture. The most recent painting in the exhibition, completed this year, is from her Colour Go Round series. The complex central motif of the Colour Go Rounds seems to be made from squares of coloured paper, dropped almost at random onto the picture surface, a conceit that allows Morris to explore layering, opacity and translucency and fresh, vibrant colour with her characteristic wit and light touch.
In 2022 Mali Morris was commissioned to design a group of thirty-three banners to hang above London’s Bond Street. Morris has donated twelve of these banners to Ikon, to display on the front exterior of the gallery during her exhibition and off-site at regional art schools to raise awareness of art education. The motif explored in Morris’ banners relate to her painting on canvas, Rain In Durango II (2015), included in Ikon’s exhibition.
Curated by
Sam Cornish
at Ikon Gallery, Birmingham
until December 22, 2023