Paul Morrison
The highly recognizable work of English artist Paul Morrison is characterized by monochromatic botanical visions. These boldly rendered gardens and landscapes are magnified, distorted, and cartoon-like, appearing through various mediums in paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and film. Morrison consciously shifts scales and takes inspiration from timeworn engravings, botanical illustrations, comics, animations, and found images. As a result, Morrison’s work vividly recalls a conglomeration of Alice in Wonderland, the Audubon Society, and comic book clips.
His unique brand of graphic illustration is typified in works such as Cytotype from 2009, which features a zoomed-in drawing of an eye; reflected in the perfectly circular, blackened pupil is a distant tree. In Tilia of 2012, an aristocratic woman stands in profile in the foreground while the scenic background reveals several classic Morrison motifs: dandelions and field-and-tree pairings abound. Regarding Morrison's work in film, pieces such as Forest echo the monochromatic format of his paintings but are incorporative of appropriated footage of moving images as diverse as those taken from Marathon Man, The Evil Dead, Bambi, and Fantasia.
Morrison has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, the Las Vegas Art …
The highly recognizable work of English artist Paul Morrison is characterized by monochromatic botanical visions. These boldly rendered gardens and landscapes are magnified, distorted, and cartoon-like, appearing through various mediums in paintings, drawings, prints, sculptures, and film. Morrison consciously shifts scales and takes inspiration from timeworn engravings, botanical illustrations, comics, animations, and found images. As a result, Morrison’s work vividly recalls a conglomeration of Alice in Wonderland, the Audubon Society, and comic book clips.
His unique brand of graphic illustration is typified in works such as Cytotype from 2009, which features a zoomed-in drawing of an eye; reflected in the perfectly circular, blackened pupil is a distant tree. In Tilia of 2012, an aristocratic woman stands in profile in the foreground while the scenic background reveals several classic Morrison motifs: dandelions and field-and-tree pairings abound. Regarding Morrison's work in film, pieces such as Forest echo the monochromatic format of his paintings but are incorporative of appropriated footage of moving images as diverse as those taken from Marathon Man, The Evil Dead, Bambi, and Fantasia.
Morrison has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, the Las Vegas Art Museum, Bloomberg Space in London, PS in Amsterdam, The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Aspen Art Museum, and UCLA’s Hammer Museum of Art, among others. Selected group exhibitions include those staged at Philadelphia’s Moore College Gallery, Glasgow’s Mitchell Library, the Flag Art Foundation in New York, the Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York, Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Tate Britain, Tel Aviv Museum, and both the Drawing Center and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
Postgraduate DIP Fine Art, Goldsmiths College of Art, London, England, 1996
British Council Collection, London, England
Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England
Fogg Art Museum, Harvard, Cambridge, MA
Government Art Collection, London, England
Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, CO
Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art, Providence, RI
Rubell Collection, Miami, FL
Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire, England
Städel Museum, Frankfurt, Germany
The Victoria and Albert Museum, London, England
Worcester City Art Gallery and Museum, Worcester, England
Cheim & Reid, New York, NY
