paul morrison, british artist and his black and white conceptual landscape painting ......................................................................................................
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paul morrison: cambium 10 september - 2 november, 2002 gallery aspreyjacques, london http://www.aspreyjacques.com --- it's the second solo show of british artist paul morrison. 'cambium' will present morrison’s largest painting to date along with a new film. --- between humour and unease paul morrison takes pleasure in destabilising the familiar. the title of the show, 'cambium', refers to a botanical term to describe the cellular tissue which annually increases the girth of exogenous trees and other plants. this confirms morrison’s quasi scientific fascination with nature which is often combined with a cartoon like or illustrative interpretation. by eliminating colour from his imagery, morrison leaves the viewer to project his own associative vision onto the canvas utilising 'colour from behind the eye'. --- plant imagery the serial nature of his paintings is expressed in the uniform black and white that characterises them throughout and the recurrence of individual plant motifs that he presents under a variety of different aspects. in his landscapes and botanical paintings morrison breathes life into the traditional genre in a skilful and multi-faceted way. he consistently quotes forms of representation familiar to us from a variety of different media and varies them in imaginative ways in his compositions. the artist takes plant imagery frompopular and classical sources: he not only draws on botanical books for inspiration but also quotes popular commonplace signets from high and low culture, ranging from cartoons to paradigms from art history / of landscape predecessors, from dürer via monet to lichtenstein, to create abstracted and often magnified visions of landscape. then he alters the images on a computer, projects them on to a surface. outlines each element in pencil, applies black paint... --- recurring motifs it is first and foremost his choice of motifs and the ingenious way he places them in the scene that lends a charm to his landscapes. there are a lot of dandelions, clouds,field-and-tree, extremely simplyfied 5-petal flowerheads,,, morrison makes inventive use of the classical elements of composition, like perspective and proportion, he literally samples different patterns of perception, confronting the beholder with them directly. sometimes he zooms individual motifs down to minute proportions behind an abstract mesh, sometimes he places them at almost painful close range directly before the eyes of the beholder. --- wall paintings in his wall paintings, especially, he confronts us with larger-than-life representations of plants, which he reproduces at very close-up range. asprey jacques will also exhibit a new installation by paul morrison as part of 'the galleries show 2002' exhibition at the royal academy, london. 13 september -10 october 2002. highlight is the weston room featuring a 360 degree wall painting. http://www.thegalleriesshow.com --- films morrison’s first film 'forest' was recently shown at southampton city art gallery and the kunsthalle nürnberg. the new film, projected on DVD, combines heavily modified footage from a number of feature films and cartoons ranging from 'marathon man' and 'the evil dead' to 'bambi' and 'fantasia'. however, the footage used is not what one would first associate with the actual films and tends to focus on what morrison terms 'the super natural'. the tone of the resulting piece is dark, suggesting an idea of the aftermath or precursor to some horrific event. like the paintings, the film is monochromatic yet manipulated in such a way that it is full of contrasts, introducing a new focus on light and shadow which is deliberately absent in the paintings where dramatic scale shifts often predominate. --- paul morrison was born in liverpool in 1966. he lives and works in london. morrison studied at goldsmiths college of art, london (graduated from MA in 1998). selected individual exhibitions : - 2002 the galleries show, the royal academy of arts, london mesophyll, magasin, grenoble corymb, kunstverein ulm cambium, asprey jacques, london bast, art & public, geneva chloroplast, southampton city art gallery; kunsthalle nürnberg - 2001 karyn lovegrove, los angeles foundation trussardi, milan tomio koyama + taro nasu, tokyo wallworks: ingrid calame/paul morrison, aspen art museum, colorado emmanuel perrotin, paris artspace, auckland - 2000 ucla hammer museum of art, los angeles ps, amsterdam carpenter center for the visual arts, harvard university, cambridge, philomene magers projekte, munich forum kunst, rottweil - 1999 franco noero, turin asprey jacques, london inverleith house, royal botanic garden, edinburgh michael janssen, cologne --- ------- monthly designboom newsletter ------- ------- ? comments and contact us ? -------	dandelion film still from 'cambium', 2002 film on DVD by paul morrison courtesy asprey jacques cambium, acrylic paint on canvas by paul morrison courtesy asprey jacques needle, 2002, acrylic on canvas by paul morrison courtesy asprey jacques phytochlore, 1999, acrylic paint on canvas by paul morrison courtesy asprey jacques xylem, 1999, acrylic paint on canvas by paul morrison courtesy asprey jacques endophyte, 2001, acrylic paint on canvas by paul morrison courtesy asprey jacques troposphere, 2000, acrylic paint directly onto wall by paul morrisonat the UCLA hammer museum, LA interzone,1999, paint directly painted onto the wall (360-degree-room-installation) by paul morrison at gallery asprey jacques panorama, 1998/99 , acrylic paint directly painted onto the wall paul morrison at the drawing centre, new york