Background
Sarah Morris was born on June 20, 1967 in Sevenoaks, Kent, United Kingdom.
Sarah Morris was born on June 20, 1967 in Sevenoaks, Kent, United Kingdom.
Morris attended Brown University from 1985 to 1989 and received her B.A. Then she attended Jesus College at Cambridge University in 1987-1988. In 1989-1990 Sarah Morris participated in the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program.
Since the mid 1990s, Sarah Morris has produced a large body of work using both painting and film. Morris’ paintings and films contain elements that complement and connect to one another, generating a constant back-and-forth play between the two. In her paintings, she uses colors and geometries that she associates with a city’s unique aesthetic vocabulary and palette, as well as its character and multiple histories.
Her films have been characterized as portraits that focus on the psychology of individuals or cities. Her films about cities, like "Midtown", "Chicago", "Los Angeles", and "Rio" depict urban scenes, capturing the architecture, politics, industry and leisure which define a specific place.
Morris has shown internationally, with solo exhibitions at Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2001), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (2005), Fondation Beyeler in Basel (2008), Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt (2009), Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (2009), Musée National Fernand Léger in Biot (2012), Kunsthalle Bremen, Bremen (2013), M Museum, Leuven (2015), Kunsthalle Wien (2016), Espoo Museum of Modern Art (Finland, 2017), and Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (Beijing, 2018).
She has created site-specific works for various institutions including the Lever House, Kunsthalle Bremen in Germany and the Gloucester Road tube station in London.
Currently, Morris lives and works in New York City, United States.
Sarah Morris is best known for her abstract paintings that feature bright colour fields and graphic line work, often referencing elements of architecture and taking titles from bureaucratic institutions.
In 1999-2000, she won a Berlin Prize at the American Academy in Berlin. In 2001, Morris received a Joan Mitchell Foundation painting award.
Her works are held by the following collecting institutions, including Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Neue Nationalgalerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; SFMoMA, San Francisco; and Tate Modern, London.
Quotes from others about the person
Bettina Funcke: "She wants to be both author and protagonist, and to her that means using compromised personalities and places as portals into entanglements of power, generating a sense of dizzying simultaneity that she translates into motives and resources for her paintings and a flow of images for her films, all of which add up to topologies of a moment in the life of power and style."
Morris was married to artist Liam Gillick.
