John Morris @ D'Amelio Terras Gallery in NY

John Morris, Untitled (detail) 2002, ink, acrylic and gel on paper, ink, acrylic and gel on paper


From ArtCat.

Well, my last show for likely a long while at a "big time", NY gallery is up. It's a small show of some old drawings the gallery now owns, which honestly I am not going to see. They are not such bad guys but on a deep level, they just don't believe in my work too much --and they are not interested in what I'm doing now.

Only one image on the site, but just imagine this stuff is really good or check it out. The truth is I am not exactly sure of which exact works are in the show. (There is also a very great looking group show in the main gallery space)

"John Morris is known primarily for creating delicate and compositionally complex works on paper that feature built up surfaces and repetitive forms, reflecting his fascination with systems and patterns. In this series of eight works dated 2002, he explores a larger scale and introduces a subtle use of color: pale blue, purple, yellow and red play against faint marks of ink or graphite. In certain works, droplets of translucent or white acrylic gel create small reliefs and reveal a second composition over the image.

The tension between the decorative and the anatomical has been a constant in John Morris’ works and is heightened in these pieces. Associations with microorganisms lend themselves easily: systems of repetitive shapes grow organically over the page, their fluid combination evokes symbiotic relationships between organisms, life cycles carried by the fusion of two elements. The marks are suggestive of cellular structure. Miniature swirls, concentric fine circles or ellipses, pendant drop shapes, crown formation of globules of acrylic gel proliferate into complex compositions and result in elaborate shapes that seem caught in stages of expansion. As the distinctions between animals and plants were not clearly defined in nature’s early stages of development, the compositions call to both classifications, as if John Morris was studying the structures and reproductive mechanisms of primitive flora and fauna."

D'Amelio Terras
525 West 22nd Street, 212-352-9460
Chelsea
June 30 - August 19, 2011
Opening: Thursday, June 30, 6 - 8 PM