Monte Clark

June 27 to August 10, 2019

Monte Clark Gallery is pleased to present a selection of recent works by Alex Morrison.

Alex Morrison’s paintings show interior domestic spaces adorned with a variety of brightly coloured architectural and design elements including wallpapers, floor treatments, wainscoting, trims, as well as plants, lamps, tables, and sculptures. They are composed by first digitally constructing 3D stage sets using software, where the surfaces are given “skins” of various patterns either referenced from historical design or the artist’s own, and the objects are created as 3D models. The sculptures depicted, as well as the tables they rest upon, are based on Morrison’s upcoming slab-work ceramics and furniture “plinths” based on the slotted together, Usonian furniture aesthetic of Frank Lloyd Wright.

Wright’s Usonian concept, known as a manifesto for Utopian middle-class American living as much as a practical architectural style, has been re-contextualized by the passage of time and changed greatly in terms of economics and stature. This inevitable aging of a past radical form of design, now depleted of it’s original message and contorted to fit into the present culture and economy, echoes Morrison’s long-term investigation into how domestic environments and architectural styles intersect with cultural ideals and beliefs, and how the vitality or influence of these ideas inevitably becomes distorted over time.

Alex Morrison (1971) was born in Redruth, UK and currently lives and works in Vancouver, Canada. He has had recent solo exhibitions at White Columns solo booth, Independent (Brussels), Galerie Levy Delval (Brussels), La Plage (Paris), Mélange (Cologne), SFU Gallery (Vancouver) and the Burnaby Art Gallery. Morrison’s work is collected by the National Gallery of Canada, the Art Gallery of Ontario, the Vancouver Art Gallery, Musée d’Art Contemporain de Montréal, Museum Abteiberg (Germany), Zabludowicz Collection (London), and numerous other public and private collections. His upcoming solo exhibition at the Contemporary Art Gallery (Vancouver) will take place in 2020.