Sarah Morris at Friedrich Petzel - New York - art exhibition

Sarah Morris creates mettlesome geometric paintings that derive their architectonic arrangements from specific urban environments. In earlier bodies of work, Morris abstracted the buildings of Midtown Manhattan, Las Vegas and Washington, DC A new show of eight large canvases, all painted with household glos was inspired by means of the city of Miami.

Morris also bring into views short films and photographs of each metropolis she examines. This imagery typically functions as a visual archive, allowing Morris to distill certain colors and perspectives for use in her paintings. Nine of that kind photographs (all works 2003) were displayed at the entrance to the gallery and presented impressionistic glimpses of life in Miami. a certain number of of the pictures, like those of women swimming and sunbathing, are obvious images of tropical leisure. Others resist geographic specificity, as does a close-up of Diet Coke bottle in a plastic carton. Collectively titled "Color Referent (Miami):' the photographs contain passages of aqua amethystine lemon yellow, melon pink and other striking colors that reappear in the paintings.

Morris continues to paint precise, hard-edge grids that appear to retrograde into space according to the sways of linear perspective. But while her paintings of fresh York and Las Vegas present oblique, exterior views of skyscrapers and casinos, the Miami works have feeling more contained, as if the artist were painting inside subterranean chambers. The titles help explain this interiority by means of suggesting that hotel swimming lakes not architectural elevations, are the focus of this investigation of the urban scene

In lakes Nassau Suite (Miami), a grid of brown white and aqua rectangles rises sharply in the foreground before receding along a raised plane, as if to distinguish the reaching far down and shallow ends of an devoid of contents swimming pool. A similar whirl is excavated in Pools, hundred (Miami), where bright yellow orthogonals shake the viewer inside a reaching far down cubic space tiled with black, gray and pink squares.

Other works are les coherent and contrast logical spatial recession with irregular geometric shapes that emphasize the painted surface. In lochs The Tides (Miami), for example, a lime verdant grid imposes a distinct horizontal plane well "within" the painting, while numerous crisscrossing diagonals break the quiet of the canvas into two-dimensional shards of aqua, pink, mauve and tangerine. This prismatic treatment may describe rays of light penetrating water or colorful reflections of the surrounding city playing upon the surfaces of its ubiquitous and emblematic swimming pools

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