02July – 23 August 2008
ba BA ba
For her third solo show at Sadie Coles HQ, Victoria Morton exhibits a group of new paintings based on her ongoing investigation into the popular art of painting and its ability to perform as a psychological object. In her paintings, which she considers sites for contemplation and adrenalin-driven repetition, Morton says that: “Everything comes from the body. Directly.” Her work simultaneously displays strength and vulnerability, alternately comic and serious, something discernable in her quoted influences and titles. She considers painting a way of registering daily experience in bouts of intense concentration. More specifically these new paintings reflect on the interrelationships between emotion, physicality, need, nourishment, and separation.
During the making of this new work Morton cites influences as diverse as Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy’s album ‘The Letting Go’, and the experience of visiting the Salimbeni brothers’ frescos in Chiesa di San Giovanni in Urbino, as well as a collection of intimate personal photographs. Folkloric storytelling and snapshot-love moments are compositionally restructured and used as a point and counterpoint on which to hang her own personal narrative. The situation the paintings make, and their broken down images, convey a series of interdependent physical and cognitive relationships. What look like disjointed letters become “figures” occupying the pictorial space and so paintings become characters enacting a psychological drama. With titles such as 'Oh Shit!' and 'ba BA ba' and combined with Morton's vivid pallet, these pictures are heady and high-spirited. All-absorbing, painting does not stop at the edge of the canvas; it moves over the frame, demands another panel to be added and occasionally is resolved free-standing or on the floor.
In this more recent work, the often subtle pallets of previous work have developed into earthy, mature and saturated tones. Her fragmentation of crumbling geometric shapes, redolent of cubism and futurism, has become even more extreme – there are no smooth lines here as in previous paintings. The result is a cacophony of raw, disparate and conflicted techniques: jagged daubs of paint, steadied thick brushstrokes, and layered clods. In Morton’s opinion, painting can communicate and reinvigorate all of life. She says: ‘For me, painting is like an extension of consciousness. It can harness the minute and otherwise incomprehensible flickerings of the mind. Instinctual, sexual, and manual drives construct the hot surface. A body part or a desire can become the same thing expressing the need to inhabit, the will to break with familiarity.'
Victoria Morton was born in 1971 in Glasgow. She studied at Glasgow School of Art, Scotland. She has had solo shows in Britain, Europe, and the United States including at Bonner Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany, 2004, and Plus and Minus, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2002. Group exhibitions include Sun By Ear with Katy Dove, Tramway, Glasgow 2007, In Viaggio, Museo Corta Alta, Fossombrone, Italy, 2004, and Painting Not Painting with Jim Lambie, Julie Roberts, and Richard Slee at Tate St Ives, Cornwall, 2003. A monograph of her work was published by Fruitmarket Gallery to coincide with her exhibition in 2002. She lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland, and Fossombrone, Italy.
24 March – 24 April 2004
‘Heterotopias enmesh actually existing sites with the impossible fantastic positions, for a while on the other hand they are real for the person as long as he or she inhabits this site, they are on the other hand totally virtual because constructed by virtue of an individual’s hallucinatory phantasmic refiguration of experienced space’
In her new paintings for her second show at HQ Victoria Morton continues to develop a language of explicit abstract realism relating to the idea of Heterotopias. For this exhibition she has made a group of paneled free standing paintings designed to slightly alter the shape of the gallery. These recent works introduce a sculptural element, further extending Morton’s spatial investigations and her concerns with recognising the viewer as the centre of perception. Her vivid canvases marry a bold flamboyance with a delicate luminosity, as she combines diverse art historical influences with photography and personal expression. The title Curiosity Action Crowd could relate to the loosely conveyed personalities who populate the paintings, including the possible gallery audience.
One large diptych, Psyche - Waiting is a contemporary interpretation of Claude’s Landscape with Psyche outside the Palace of Cupid. Morton considers this piece ‘a progressive portrait...but it is not supposed to portray an external self. I wanted to draw attention to another figurative realism in the painting rather than the landscape element as this is visually apparent. The realism in the painting is a psychological one. The fragmentation in the painting follows a kind of mental movement.’ Morton’s reworking shows a messy sensuous flux in contract to the balanced calm of the original. This fragmentation, visually reminiscent of cubism and futurism, is a more accurate approximation of the artists, and indeed our, mental processes, which allows for and mirrors distractions and negotiations as thoughts develop.
Curiosity Action Crowd, parts 1 and 2, the pieces that title the show, have been influenced by medieval pilgrim painting, photo journalism and the Dada tendency of Picabia. A visual outpouring of physical and mental experiences, borrowed images and displaced searching indicating an interest in the folklore of the painted image.
As with the paintings, Morton’s titles appear to be a kind of dislocated yet precise stream of consciousness - perhaps prompted by memories, they then trigger their own new series of connections for the viewer. They offer, at tangents, alternative entrance points as she attempts to situate the viewer within the paintings.
Victoria Morton lives and works in Glasgow. She has had solos shows in Britain, Europe and the United States. In 2002 she was commissioned by the Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh to create new paintings and in 2003 she was part of Painting Not Painting with Jim Lambie, Julie Roberts and Richard Slee at Tate St. Ives. Her work will be included this year in a group show at the Whitechapel Gallery, London.
HQ is pleased to present new paintings by Victoria Morton, one of a group of artists emerging from Glasgow. Her abstract paintings are arrangements of conscious and unconscious thought, inner landscapes that use a spatial structure based on optics rather than a single point perspective to evoke a hallucinatory sense of double vision. Borrowing the idea of continuous composition from music, each painting suggests movement and an unfolding of visual and spatial possibilities.
This new body of work reflects an interest in Renaissance and Old Master paintings from a personal point of view, where something very beautiful can also be sinister at the same time. In Plus and Minus, one of the largest canvases, a dazzling rainbow angel wing or a mechanical bird is evoked emerging and flickering from a dark mass. Like a poem, the subject of each painting has been richly condensed and examined from an emotive perspective.