Sarah Morris

Sarah Morris was born in 1967 in Sevenoaks, Kent, United Kingdom, and lives and works in New York. She studied at Brown University and the University of Cambridge before participating in the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program. Working across painting and filmmaking, Morris examines the psychological, social and political structures of contemporary urban environments, with particular attention to architecture, systems of power, media and bureaucracy. Morris first gained recognition in the 1990s with paintings that incorporated words, signs and imagery associated with popular and consumer culture. Her subsequent Midtown series (1998–2001), inspired by the architecture and corporate façades of Manhattan, introduced the geometric grids, vivid colours and reflective surfaces that became central to her visual language. Executed primarily in household gloss paint, these works transform architectural details and urban patterns into complex abstract compositions. Painting and filmmaking operate as parallel and interconnected strands of her practice. Her films construct fragmented portraits of cities and institutions through architecture, infrastructure, advertising, human activity and systems of circulation. Capital (2001), for example, examines Washington, D.C., through sites including the White House, the World Bank, the Pentagon and the Watergate complex, revealing the relationships between political authority, institutional architecture and the representation of power. Other films and related painting series have focused on cities including Los Angeles, Beijing, Rio de Janeiro, Abu Dhabi and Osaka. Over time, Morris has expanded her visual vocabulary beyond architectural grids to incorporate diagrams, maps, corporate identities, transport networks, Olympic symbols, lunar cycles and organic structures such as spiderwebs. Moving between observation and abstraction, her works explore how individuals navigate the interconnected spatial, economic and symbolic systems that shape contemporary life. In 2023, Deichtorhallen Hamburg presented All Systems Fail, the most comprehensive survey of Morris’s work to date, bringing together paintings, films, drawings, sculptures and site-specific works from across three decades. The exhibition subsequently travelled to the Kunstmuseen Krefeld and other European institutions. In 2024, Tai Kwun Contemporary in Hong Kong presented Who is Who, an exhibition of new work featuring the film ETC and the site-specific wall painting Lippo [Paul Rudolph].