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28/4/2011

Sarah Morris

Capitain Petzel, Berlin

Capitain Petzel Berlin is pleased to host John Hancock, an exhibition of new works by Sarah Morris and her film Points on a Line (2010). Furthermore, Capitain Petzel is delighted to announce a special screening and premiere at the Babylon Mitte Cinema, on April 30 of Morris’ latest film, Chicago (2011).

Sarah Morris is an internationally recognized painter and filmmaker, known for her complex abstractions, which play with architecture, design and the psychology of urban environments. Morris views her paintings as parallel to her films – both trace urban, social and bureaucratic topologies. In both media, she explores the psychology of the contemporary city and its architecturally encoded politics. Morris assesses what today’s urban structures, bureaucracies, cities and nations might conceal and surveys how a particular moment can be inscribed and embedded into its visual surfaces. Often, these non-narrative fictional analyses result in studies of conspiratorial power, structures of control, and the mapping of global socio-political networks.

In this exhibition, Morris will be exhibiting a new series of paintings: John Hancock. Using as a starting point the iconic 1967 Skidmore, Owings and Merrill building, called the John Hancock Center, Morris uses forms reminiscent of the structure of the first multi-use high rise building in America: An antenna, an ancillary spiral, the X-bracing exterior. Morris’s paintings create forms that are continuously splintering and self-generating, and without resolution, creating after-images of capitalism and pre-images of new systems of control. The paintings also play with the history of John Hancock as the ‘father of the signature’ — his flamboyant, stylish signature as a sign of ironic mockery and belligerence. Morris appropriates and streamlines the corporatization of Hancock’s signature using her own initials in the new work, invoking a long history of not only industrial design, but also the role of the signature in relation to the aesthetic.

The exhibition will also feature Morris’s film Points on a Line (2010) about the Farnsworth House, Plano, Illinois by Mies van der Rohe and the Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut by Philip Johnson. The film documents a shared desire to build structures that might change the way we think about a house, a form and a context. These two buildings were the result of shared ideas and collective desire. But they also complicate ideas of the copy and the original and the chronologies of Modernism. By carefully documenting the daily maintenance of these two buildings and lingering over the precise placement of the structures in space and of objects within each structure, we are presented with a clear view of places that have gone beyond their initial modest use and become the intersection of a dialogue that was both personal and professional.

Morris filmed at both sites over the course of several months, among other locations including The Four Seasons Restaurants, the Seagram Building, Mies van der Rohe’s infamous Lake Shore Drive, and Chicago’s Newberry Library. Morris utilizes The Four Seasons, a place that Philip Johnson practically used as his personal office, as the meeting point between the two architects. Morris’s film is both a record of preservation of two structures and a document of power plays that left a mark in the pragmatic idealism of the late modern period.

When Mies van der Rohe emigrated to America in 1938, with the help of Philip Johnson, and was established as the Head of Architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology, he not only created an image of America, but the reality of the contemporary American society. Continuing to play with duality, Morris’ Chicago is tandem with Points on a Line, shifting the lens to a panorama of an American city in transition. Chicago will be shown for the first time at the Berlin Gallery Weekend in the Babylon Mitte Cinema. The film investigates the psychology, architecture and aesthetic of the American city made all the more resonant in the wake of President Obama’s administration.

In Chicago, Morris reveals a new cityscape by tracking its modern architecture; the seemingly dead printed world of publishing headquarted there, as well as its industrial role. A century after the publication of Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, the issues shift from food production to consumption and a struggling printing, publishing and advertising world. A sequence of images and cinematic situations set to an original musical score by the artist Liam Gillick, range from John Hancock Center, Vienna Beef factory, Playboy Headquarters, Fermilab – home of one of the world’s largest energy particle accelerator, Mayor Richard Daley, Ebony headquarters, and Alinea.

Sarah Morris lives and works in New York and London. She received the Joan Mitchell Foundation Painting Award in 2001, and in 1999-2000 was an American Academy Award, Berlin Prize Fellow. Morris recently has had two extensive solo exhibitions in Europe at the Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (2009) and Museo d'Arte Moderna, Bologna (2009).

Press contact:
artpress – Ute Weingarten l Elisabethkirchstraße 15 l 10115 Berlin
Phone: +49 30 21961843 l E-Mail: artpress@uteweingarten.de

Image: Sarah Morris: Chicago, 2011, Stills from a colour film in HD
© Sarah Morris, Courtesy Capitain Petzel Berlin

Screening of Sarah Morris’ film Chicago Saturday 30 April 2011, 6 p.m.
Babylon Berlin Mitte
Rosa-Luxemburg-Straße 30
The artist will be present. The screening will be open to the public.
Media representatives are asked to accredit in advance.

Opening: Friday 29 April 2011, 6 to 8.30 p.m.

Capitain Petzel
Karl-Marx-Allee 45, 10178 Berlin
Opening hours: Tuesday–Saturday 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

free entry

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