Do Canaries Have Accents? Notes From Berlin: Rebecca Morris

by Art Fag City on July 2, 2009 · 2 comments Reviews

POST BY: KAREN ARCHEY

art fag city, rebecca morris
Rebecca Morris installation at Galerie Barbara Weiss. Photo Karen Archey

AFC Associate Editor Karen Archey was fortunate enough to spend some time in Berlin during our recent European art tour. This series of reviews reflects a handful of galleries we visited throughout May and June.

Galerie Barbara Weiss
Zimmerstrasse 88-91
10117 Berlin
Rebecca Morris

Is Rebecca Morris a well informed master painter or a trite new age hippy? It's hard to tell. Her solo effort, Shards and Skywindows, reeks of early Nickelodeon-era craft projects (think fimo beads, puff paint, gak, and hemp necklaces), but this bizarre aesthetic may offer a fresh take on historical abstraction. Riffed with protozoa-like shapes and metallic enamel, Morris' new body of work evokes an unlikely combination of Elizabeth Murray's feminine polygon canvases and Jackson Pollock's energetic Ab-ex drips. Pollock-esque metallic circles paired with feminine bleeds antagonize each other formally while other paintings play with positive and negative space. Morris' exhibition may provoke the same out-of-fashion-anxiety that a Murray would today, yet the younger 90's era tongue-in-cheekness takes it out of clich. The paintings lay metallic enamel pools over looser underpaintings, echoing the exhibition's title. Complicated by their loose rendition and earthy color palate, her spacey structures mesh the pop cultural with the art historical.

{ 2 comments }

mike July 5, 2009 at 7:11 pm

“yet the younger 90’s era tongue-in-cheekness takes it out of clich (sic)” — you need an é there.

mike July 5, 2009 at 2:11 pm

“yet the younger 90’s era tongue-in-cheekness takes it out of clich (sic)” — you need an é there.

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