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.
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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's 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), Musée National Fernand Léger in Biot (2012), M Museum, Leuven, Belgium (2015), Kunsthalle Wein, Vienna, Austria (2016), Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Espoo, Finland (2017), UCCA, Beijing, China (2018),
Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2024)
Her mid-career retrospective titled "All Systems Fail" traveled to multiple cities and museums in 2023 and 2024 including: Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany [1], Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany [2], Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland [3] and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany [4].
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, the Gloucester Road tube station in London, the Metropolitan Transportation Authority, Dutch Kills / 39th Ave Subway Station, Ad-Diriyah Biennale in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, St. Louis Lambert International Airport, General Dynamics Headquarters in Reston, Virginia, Tulsa Convention Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma, Gateway School for Sciences, Queens, New York, and Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, Ohio, Key Biscayne Community Center, Key Biscayne, Florida.
Morris's 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)
Public collections
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo
Berardo Collection, Sintra, Portugal
Beyeler Foundation, Riehen, Switzerland
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
DekaBank, Frankfurt am Main
Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy
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
Hamburger Bahnhof, Museum fur Gegenwart, Berlin
Jumex Museum, Ciudad de Mexico
Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen
Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg
Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich
Luma Foundation, Arles, France
Miami Art Museum
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)
ETC (2024)
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.