It’s a homecoming of sorts for the Kent-born, New York-based artist, who debuts new paintings and her first ever sculptural work at the gallery’s Bermondsey space.
Sarah Morris is having a moment: the US artist’s first solo exhibition in the UK in six years sees her emerge from what has largely been a cocoon of film and painting, along with her first ever sculptural work. ‘Machines do not make us into Machines’ at White Cube Bermondsey is as much an exhibition as a manifesto. But what does it say? A great deal as it happens, though it’s hard to tell rhetoric from reality. Morris believes that truth lies not in what can be proven, but what can be disproved. This London show is what happens when the assertion of a scientist, the insight of political philosopher and the artistic flair of a true radical collide. Morris was born in Kent to a family of medics and forms Cambridge University’s prestigious alumni. But even before Sarah Lucas, Tracey Emin and Damien Hirst had begun scandalising the nation with sex, death and pickled farm animals, Morris had fled the nest to America. The YBA who got away? Not really, she herself will explain how she might have been born in Britain, but she was made in New York. She now occupies a Long Island studio in a former aviation manufacturing facility – an industrial space for an industrial scale mentality. For Morris, language is, quite literally, a construct. She’s invented her own painted dialect which looks and sounds somewhere between the synthetic snarl of scrolling computer code and a political declaration. The gathering of ideas is as regimented as the execution, and it all begins with plucking phonetics from sentences and plotting coordinates.
‘Machines do not make us into Machines’ at White Cube Bermondsey. Photography: Ollie Hammick. © Sarah Morris. Courtesy of White Cube
Installation view of Sarah Morris’ ‘Machines do not make us into Machines’ at White Cube Bermondsey. Photography: Ollie Hammick. © Sarah Morris. Courtesy of White Cube
Installation view of Sarah Morris’ ‘Machines do not make us into Machines’ at White Cube Bermondsey. Photography: Ollie Hammick. © Sarah Morris. Courtesy of White Cube
Machines do not make us into machines [Sound Graph], 2018, by Sarah Morris, household gloss on canvas. Photography: Tom Powel Imaging. © Sarah Morris. Courtesy of White Cube
April 2019, 2019, by Sarah Morris, household gloss on canvas. Photography: Tom Powel Imaging. © Sarah Morris. Courtesy of White Cube
INFORMATION :‘Machines do not make us into Machines’ is on view until 30 June. For more information, visit the White Cube website
ADDRESS :White Cube
144-152 Bermondsey Street
London SE1 3TQ
Courtesy of Wallpaper