Rebecca Morris

Rebecca Morris (b. 1969 in Honolulu, Hawaii, lives and works in Los Angeles, CA) is a painter deeply committed to abstraction, her work evolving and developing through an interrogation of materials, forms, processes, and outcomes. A showcase for her extensive arsenal of techniques and ideas, her ambitious large-scale canvases contain a personalized language of forms and compositions in differing manners of mark-making. Her work inventively explores questions of frame dynamics and figure/ground illusions, often within a remarkably shallow pictorial space. The results are enlivened by a sense of painterly improvisation and grounded by an underlying rationale – a combination that imbues the work with a feeling of the contemporary world while referring back to the very foundations of modernist abstraction.

Morris is the subject of a solo exhibition opening this September at the MCA Chicago. The show, curated by Jamillah James, is traveling from the Institute of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, and looks at the past 21 years of Morris’ practice. Other significant shows include those at the Blaffer Art Museum, (2019); Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Holland (2014); The Renaissance Society, (2005) and 356 Mission Rd. and LAXART in Los Angeles. Her work has been included in group shows at the Wexner Center for the Arts (2018); the Hammer Museum (2016); and the Whitney Biennial (2014). Her work is in various public collections, including The Hirshhorn Museum ; The Hammer Museum; The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles; The Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego; The Art Institute of Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art; The Cleveland Art Museum; Sammlung Goetz, Munich, Germany; Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Netherlands; and the DePaul Art Museum.

 

Portrait: Courtesy of the Rebecca Morris. Photography by Manfredi Gioacchini 

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