PRESENTATION: Sarah Morris-Transactional Authority

Sarah Morris oscillates between film and painting, between pictorial abstraction and analytical films. Her research is focused on typologies in urban architecture and sociological mechanisms in big American metropolises. She graduated in, among other things, political and social sciences from the University of Cambridge in 1988, she is a self-taught artist. She then worked as an assistant for Jeff Koons while attending the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program in 1990.

By Efi MIchalarou
Photo: Nakanoshima Museum of Art Archive

“Transactional Authority”, is the first retrospective exhibition in Japan of the = Sarah Morris. Morris has produced a large body of work which reflects her interest in networks, typologies, globalization, architecture, institutions and the metropolis. Through her use of both reality and vivid abstraction, Morris creates a new language of place and politics. Morris is considered one of the most intriguing artists of her generation.

The exhibition features close to 100 artworks created over the course of more than three decades incorporating paintings, all of Morris’s 17 films, drawings, and a newly commissioned large-scale wall painting. Morris’s film “Sakura” was shot in Kansai in 2018 at the moment when the Sakura tree blossoms over a three- to four-day period and people travel from all over the world to witness that durational spectacle.

The exhibition features about 40 of Morris’s iconic paintings, from her earliest to latest works. Moreover, her films, which she created in tandem with her paintings, will all be shown, including a new film. The exhibition is presented in chronological order throughout her entire oeuvre which reflects on the flux of major cities around the world, depicting their intricately intertwined cultural, political, and economic structures with beauty, tension and ambivalence through both painting and film.

The exhibition also features works related to Japan, including a large-scale new wall painting created especially for the exhibition and the film “Sakura” which she shot in various places in the Kansai region during 2018. Tracing the culture and the undercurrents of the city, Morris captures individuals and sites as varied as the famous paint and pastel factory, Sakura, the UNESCO-recognized Bunraku theater, Renzo Piano’s Kansai International Airport, Kendo, the Yamazaki Suntory Distillery, and the laboratory of Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr. Shinya Yamanaka. “Sakura” is a tale of Japan’s original mercantile and cultural capital. Looking at Osaka as a twin city or ghost capital, the film takes the city’s continual reinvention as a mirror of Japan’s economic and cultural lineage. Morris slices through the urban space to reveal an archaeological cross section where the ghosts of the past and concepts for the future are put forth, captured, and endlessly reflected. The film, a complex psychological panorama of the politics of situations, exploits the boundaries of documentary and fiction, and collates the city’s contemporary moment.

Morris began to work seriously as an artist in New York in the 1990s. Her early “Sign paintings” emerged from the hardware store signages that designated boundaries. The constitutional rights to bear arms and protect property are behind the imperatives “BEWARE OF THE DOG” or “NO LOITERING”. With the reduced language of the signs, the artist maps an aspect of the prevalent paranoia in the USA.

In the early 1990’s Sarah Morris rents a cheap studio at 42nd Street, near Times Square, where the contrast between shady nightlife and the glossy facades of big US-corporations is ever-present. The “Midtown” series is based on high-rise buildings in Midtown Manhattan representing centers of the global economy, including the Seagram Building (designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson). Morris surveys the tension-filled district with her camera, collects fragments of architecture and translates them into paintings. The gridded compositions of Midtown’s buildings stay apparent, while the glossy color adds a psychological reading of the architecture.

“Sound Graph” is a painting series that lies at the intersection of her paintings and films. The series uses speech that Morris recorded while shooting her film “Finite and Infinite Games” as a starting point for the compositions. Featuring hard-edged geometric shapes, the compositions in the paintings progress and recede in patterns that appear to fluctuate across the canvas, creating a sense of volumetric build-up and release, as if as a visual analogy of coding.

Forced to stay at home due to the COVID-19 pandemic, Morris turned her attention to something in nature that was close at hand: spiderwebs. Morris used organic structure of spiderwebs as a starting point for this series, fascinated by their seemingly arbitrary yet systematical shapes. The evolving organisms serve as an analogy to urban landscape.

In tandem with her paintings depicting major cities around the world, Morris also creates films based on her experiences in those places. “Sakura” was filmed when she visited Kansai during the cherry blossom season in 2018.

Her footage captures various locations, including a factory that produces Cray-Pas oil pastels, a bunraku puppet theater stage, and a nightlife district. “Sakura” is a tale of Japan’s original mercantile and cultural capital. Looking at Osaka as a twin city or ghost capital, the film takes the city’s continual reinvention as a mirror unto Japan’s economic and cultural lineage. Morris slices through the urban space to reveal an archeological cross section where the ghosts of the past and concepts for the future are put forth, captured, and endlessly reflected. The film, a complex psychological panorama of the politics of situations, exploits the boundaries of documentary and fiction, and collates the city’s unique duration of time.

“Sakura” was shot in Kansai in 2018 at the moment when the Sakura tree blossoms over a three- to four-day period and people travel from all over the world to witness that durational spectacle. This film has a special connection to the museum, as the catalyst for its creation was NAKKA’s construction as a new art museum celebrating Osaka as a city of culture.

Photo: Sarah Morris, Lippo [Paul Rudolph] Installation view at Tai Kwun Contemporary, 2024, Household gloss paint on wall, 6.74 × 20.95 m © Sarah Morris, Commissioned by Tai Kwun Contemporary

Info: Nakanoshima Museum of Art, 4-3-1, Nakanoshima, Kita-ku, Osaka, Japan, Duration: 31/1-5/4/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-17:00, https://nakka-art.jp/en/