Winston Wächter Fine Art, New York is excited to announce Cobalt Blue, the gallery’s third solo exhibition with Annie Morris. Working across mediums including sculpture, painting and thread works, Morris is well known for her large-scale emotionally charged use of color. Morris’s practice is born out of an obsessive collection of figurative and abstract techniques in which she merges materials such as raw pigment, colored thread and more recently moving into bronze, aluminum and steel, in her ongoing quest to capture the essence of joy.
For this exhibition, Morris has produced her most ambitious sculpture to date. Stack 10 Cobalt Blue is a 3.5 meter cast bronze sculpture made at a foundry on the outskirts of London, working with technicians famous for fabricating Barbara Hepworth’s sculpture. Over the past two years, she has been investigating techniques to transform her pigment stack sculptures into the solidity of bronze. Morris layers the bronze with pigments, as well as oxides and nitrates, to allow the build up of color. These colors are burned into the surface of the sculpture, unifying the materiality of the bronze and capturing the color deep in its surface. The result is a work that seems to glow from the core. This sculpture is engineered to live outside so that it can interact with landscapes beyond the gallery walls.
Morris also continues her intrigue with the use of thread as viewed in the work, Colour and Steel 2017. In Colour and Steel 2017, lines of colour are sewn freehand and appear more sculptural than painterly. Here, the softness of the thread and the solidity of the metal combine so it is a continuous piece of line and structure. The lines within the piece take on more lines when they are embroidered. Morris’s interest is to change something as spontaneous as the act of drawing, and slow down the act of looking.
The exhibition also features new pigment stack sculptures including the intriguing, Black Stack 10, a slight departure for Morris. In this stack sculpture, Morris uses black pigment, chalk and watercolor on its surface.
For the last 10 years, Annie Morris has continued to experiment with abstraction and the separation of color, obsessively deconstructing and assembling fragments in order to form a harmonious whole. Morris captures the inherent energy and life that can be found in something as simple as a line, stacked or drawn.
Annie Morris was born in London, where she currently lives and works. In 2002, she received her degree from École des Beaux-Arts Paris. Since then, she has received international acclaim for her considered approach to drawing, sculpture and painting. Selected exhibitions include those at The Royal Academy, London; Baku MoMA, Azerbaijan; The New Art Gallery, Walsall; and Tate Gallery, St Ives.
