For more than 30 years, Sarah Morris (b. 1967) has used her singular, non-narrative visual language to explore the various mechanisms that make up urban environments, social networks, typologies, and power structures. Morris continually builds on a vast body of work that spans a range of different media including painting, film, site-specific murals and sculpture, posters, and drawings. Indeed, her current retrospective, All Systems Fail—now traveling from Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen to the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Zentrum Paul Klee, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart—positions her as one of the most intriguing artists of her generation. Pinecones and Corporations is the artist's second solo exhibition in Korea in 13 years, since Clips, Knots, and 1972at Gallery Hyundai in 2010.
With origins firmly rooted within the magnetic field of late capitalism, which began unfolding in earnest in the 1990s, Sarah Morris's body of work continues to incorporate a wide range of social structures and market economies. Her interests span multinational corporations, architecture, generic stem cell technology, Academy Awards, the Olympics, transportation networks, mapping, lunar cycles, museums, printing presses, factories of all sorts, fashion, and mail systems, just to name a few. Positing that these tangible, real-world phenomena represent the power, order, and control embedded in the social, political, and economic structures around us, Morris expresses them in a concise visual language of vibrant color and geometric forms. From short texts reminiscent of advertising copies to the repetition and superimposition of lines, circles, grids, fragmented Venn diagrams, schematics, and organic "webs" that echo those commonly found in technical manuscripts, the images at play lend structure to the artist’s vision on the politics of surface.
In Pinecones and Corporations, Sarah Morris presents the "pinecone" and the "corporation" as constituent parts of a seemingly oppositional environment. The organic characteristics of the pinecone, such as its morphological echo of the Fibonacci sequence and its ability to reproduce, here recall the workings of a corporation, the way it functions as both the backbone and driving force of various urban and social systems with its cyclical structure of producers (employees) and production (labor), commodities (capital), and factories (power). Paintings in the exhibition are divided into smaller groupings of pine trees, pinecones, and corporations; the specific object of each piece can be deduced from the characteristic iconography and titles.
Pinecones and Corporations highlights three films: Strange Magic (2014), Abu Dhabi (2017), and Sakura (2018), which are multilayered reflections on cities from different cultures across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia—specifically Paris, Abu Dhabi, and Osaka, respectively. Strange Magic documents the design and construction process of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, a collaboration amongst the French government, the city of Paris, and the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy (LVMH) Foundation. Shot on location between Los Angeles where Frank Gehry's Gehry Partners, LLP, is based, and Paris, the film starts with a voiceover narration by Gehry himself, provocatively placing business as parallel creativity. The piece also reveals the multifaceted nature of the luxury industry, touching on perfume, fashion, champagne, and more, criss-crossing the boundaries between “production” and “consumption” while exposing the flow of wealth between “fantasy” and “reality.” This work was commissioned by the Fondation Louis Vuitton.
