SARAH MORRIS – MIDTOWN PAINTINGS: 1998–2001
2018-11-12The year is 1993: Sarah Morris, mid twenties, rents a studio between Times Square and Port Authority Bus Terminal on 42nd Street, a place, she says, where “urban decay and excess meet mainstream”. Drawn to explore the coded relationship she witnesses between people and architecture at this nexus of pornography and the corporate world, Morris records, surveys, absorbs fragments and particles of visual information: a flâneur’s view of the mapping of power. Embedded in New York’s real estate, redolent with the artist’s trespassing eye, the Midtown paintings and Morris’s first paradigmatic film, index the artist’s unique vision of the city and its future.
Fast forward twenty years—the Midtown paintings and the eponymous nine minute, 16mm film have become the visual distillation of Morris’s practice: precise, glamorous, de-familiarizing; portentous of dystopic futurism. Midtown is a harbinger of Morris’ series to follow, as the artist situated herself and her subject matter in the cities of Washington D.C., Los Angeles, Beijing, Rio, Abu Dhabi among others. The Midtown paintings and film are also prescient of a world on the cusp of change and equally of the artist’s role in relation to that.
Opposite – Midtown – Morgan Stanley Dean Witter, 1999
Exhibition runs through to January 5th, 2019
Petzel Gallery
456 W 18th Street
NY 10011
New York
