Sarah Morris

Since the mid-1990s, Sarah Morris has been an internationally recognized painter and filmmaker, known for her complex abstractions, which play with architecture and psychology of urban environments.  Morris has always been interested in exploring means of communication. Architecture is just one such vehicle. Morris' films operate between documentary, the biography of a city, non-narrative fiction and sites of production and leisure.

Morris views her paintings as a parallel activity to her films; the former combine allusions to corporate architecture and pure abstraction to construct a theatrical location at once both critiquing her sources and harnessing their power. Her paintings convey an ambivalent impression, hanging somewhere between the facades of corporate architecture and pure abstraction, critique and power, and are inspired by cinematic architecture, industrial design and urban theater.

Morris uses a conceptual strategy of duality in her films, which investigate both the surface of a city - its architecture and geography - as well as its 'interior': the psychology of its inhabitants and key players. To do this, Morris employs very different kinds of cinematography - from documentary recording to apparently narrative scenarios - which work as a method of visual distraction, a way of exploring the urban environment, and more particularly its issues of social power and representation.

Born in the U.K. in 1967, Sarah Morris lives and works in New York and
London.  She attended Brown University, Cambridge University, and the
Whitney Museum of American Art's Independent Study Program.  She received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting Award in 2001, and in 1999-2000 was an American Academy Award, Berlin Prize Fellow.