Adrian Morris

Adrian Morris

Adrian Grant Morris (May 18, 1929 in London – December 6, 2004 in London) was an English painter. Following a successful retrospective exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London in May/June, 2008, works were included in their mixed Autumn exhibition, 2009. The gallery is mounting a further show of his paintings and works on paper from 8 June to 29 July 2010.

Background and Education

He spent his childhood in rural Somerset before the family moved to the USA where he attended the progressive Putney School in Vermont. There his precocious talent for painting, inspired by the surrealists in New York, was given full rein. On his return to the UK in 1947, after completion of National Service in the army and spells at art schools in London (Anglo-French Art Centre) and Paris (L'Académie de la Grande Chaumière), he finished his art education at the Royal Academy Schools.

Career

Although a dedicated painter all his life, he was reserved in showing his work, but over the years he did exhibit at a number of leading London galleries, including the Hayward Annual in 1978 where sixteen of his works were shown. He sketched ideas for paintings at every opportunity, especially when he was away from his studio, teaching. Dominating themes were the earth, its vulnerability to both natural and man-made disasters and the effect on its inhabitants.

He was inspired in the sixties by the NASA programme and the views of distant, barren terrain seen through a spacecraft hatch. Although figures, such as astronauts, refugees, wounded soldiers and poor rural workers, feature strongly in preliminary sketches, they seldom survive into the finished works - as William Packer observed in The Times, the figures had gone "leaving a space or structure in which a figure indeed might be, but as an implicit presence". These, typically, are painted in oil on gessoed panels, which are pared down to the minimum, every square inch minutely considered.

Critical Opinion

♦ "Morris's work speaks directly of the anxieties and hopes we now harbour about our planet's state in the twenty-first century. There is an impressive level of consistency and rigour running through his mature output. It amounts to a formidable corpus of work. The paintings' austere, hard-won and, above all precient eloquence deserves to be recognised today" - Richard Cork, exhibition catalogue, 2008.

♦ "A distinctive and distinguished painter, his work is elusive of category, its own thing, minimal rather than minimalist, abstracted rather than abstract, worked always with a scrupulous address to the matter of the painting, not just as an image but as a thing" - William Packer, The Times, 2005

♦ "Adrian Morris's work cannot easily be located in contemporary art...This image of pioneering work in remote places often acts as a metaphor of exploration into the mental or physical unknown or as the artist described it: 'Journeying out into space as far as the mind can go and one can physically follow, while at the same time retaining one's rots in the earth - man must and will migrate further'" - Sarah Kent, Hayward Annual '78 catalogue.

♦ "The images are tense and still, the paint rubbed into the gesso, layer on layer until it seems to become the material it depicts, metal and sand, amplifying the disquiet...Morris's imagery leads us to infer a somehow sacrosanct 'humanist' or 'existential' content - Adrian Searle, Art Scribe, 1978

External links

• Redfern Gallery