Mali Morris RA: Paintings on canvas and paper, 2000 – 2010
24 September—1 December 2010
In the Sir Hugh Casson Room for Friends of the Royal Academy
Open to the public daily 4–6pm, Fridays until 10pm. Admission free
Mali Morris, 'Escape', 2009. Acrylic on canvas. Photo: David Webb. Courtesy of the Artist.
This exhibition is an opportunity to see a collection of paintings by the recently elected Royal Academician, Mali Morris. The works illustrate the development of her practice applied to small-scale paintings on both canvas and paper and offer a wonderful insight into how her work has developed over the last ten years.
Morris sees these works as being very distinct from her large-scale canvases:
“I started working on smaller canvases 15 years ago, moving towards a different way of making paintings. Colour relationships, more compressed and sparse than in the larger works, seemed to construct a new kind of light, and I liked the intimacy of scale.
In all these paintings colour was deliberately buried, so that it could be re-discovered through a kind of improvised choreography. In the final stages of this excavation I have to work fast to find the painting. I often have to start over, putting them aside for another day, or month, or year...
The works on paper are more immediate, and allow for the luminosity of the ground to show through - I don’t think of them as studies but as small paintings in their own right, on a different surface, part of an on-going working process, another form of exploration.”
Mali Morris was born in North Wales, and studied Fine Art at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne, and the University of Reading. She has exhibited nationally and internationally since the late 1970s, and is represented in the collections of the Arts Council, British Council, Contemporary Art Society, Government Art Collection, National Museum Cardiff, and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester.
Mali Morris was elected as a Royal Academician in March 2010.
Download the List of Works 
