You might feel trepidation at first, stepping into British artist Annie Morris’ current exhibition at Timothy Taylor’s Chelsea gallery. Colourful spheres balance improbably on top of one another in teetering totems. It’s a dystychiphobiac’s worst nightmare.
Morris – who shares a studio in London with her husband, the artist Idris Khan – began her Stack sculptures as a way to deal with her pain after she had a stillbirth. Morris has said that while mourning the loss of their baby, she became obsessed with the ball shape in her drawings, connecting it to her pregnancies (the couple have two children).
Sculpted in plaster and sand, the precarious boulders are painted with vibrant hand-sourced pigments, a palette that includes dazzling ultramarine, viridian and earthy ochre. They stand on concrete and steel bases, Morris sees their precariousness as also defiant – they stand tall, despite the all the odds. They recall Ugo Rondinone’s rainbow-coloured stone towers, but with entirely different references and resonances.
Making your way between the maze of sculptures that fills the floor and takes you out to the courtyard where there is a further Stack work, there are also new tapestry works by Morris, climbing up to three metres up the walls. Here, Morris gets deeper into art history, exploring the formal concerns of composition and translating them into a series of structural, abstract grids, collaged together and stitched with a machine, a lexicon that is distinct, more rigid stable than the sculptures – the opposite of what you’d expect from textile works.
Nature, form and spirit are in symbiosis in Morris’ modest, intimate and painterly exhibition, eschewing the usual dichotomy between abstraction and representation, two dimensions and three. Morris has said that she sees all of her works as interconnected, and at her New York exhibition there’s a feeling that all these parts belong to a wonky, wonderful whole – perfectly imbalanced.
INFORMATION
‘Annie Morris’, until 19 October, Timothy Taylor. timothytaylor.com
ADDRESS
Timothy Taylor
515 West 19th Street
New York
-
How an icon of Japanese Metabolist architecture took on a life of its own – even after its destructionWhen Kishō Kurokawa designed the modular Nakagin Capsule Tower more than 50 years ago, he imagined it boarding ships and travelling the world. Now it has, thanks to a new show at MoMA
-
Six vases become 28 jewels in Boucheron’s new high jewellery collectionCreative director Claire Choisne nods to the Japanese art of flower arranging with vases that disassemble into high jewellery rings, necklaces, brooches and more
-
In Santander, a cotton candy-coloured HQ is a contemporary delightSantander’s Colección ES Headquarters, a multifunctional space for art, office work, and hosting, underwent a refurbishment by Carbajo Hermanos, drawing inspiration from both travels and local context
-
Rolf Sachs’ largest exhibition to date, ‘Be-rühren’, is a playful study of touchA collection of over 150 of Rolf Sachs’ works speaks to his preoccupation with transforming everyday objects to create art that is sensory – both emotionally and physically
-
Architect Erin Besler is reframing the American tradition of barn raisingAt Art Omi sculpture and architecture park, NY, Besler turns barn raising into an inclusive project that challenges conventional notions of architecture
-
The dynamic young gallerists reinvigorating America's art scene'Hugging has replaced air kissing' in this new wave of galleries with craft and community at their core
-
Meet the New York-based artists destabilising the boundaries of societyA new show in London presents seven young New York-based artists who are pushing against the borders between refined aesthetics and primal materiality
-
‘Her pictures looked like pictures everybody knew were the truth’: Diane Arbus at the ArmoryMatthieu Humery curates more than 400 of Arbus’ photographs at New York’s Park Avenue Armory – every picture she was known to have printed
-
Mystic, feminine and erotic: the power of Penny Slinger’s bodies as landscapeArtist Penny Slinger continues her exploration of the sacred, surreal feminine in a Santa Monica exhibition, ‘Meeting at the Horizon’
-
What is recycling good for, asks Mika Rottenberg at Hauser & Wirth MenorcaUS-based artist Mika Rottenberg rethinks the possibilities of rubbish in a colourful exhibition, spanning films, drawings and eerily anthropomorphic lamps
-
Out of office: the Wallpaper* editors’ picks of the weekIt was a jam-packed week for the Wallpaper* staff, entailing furniture, tech and music launches and lots of good food – from afternoon tea to omakase
