Nino Mier Gallery is pleased to present A Warm Articulation, an exhibition of paintings by Glasgow- and Fossombrone-based artist Victoria Morton. The artist’s first solo exhibition with gallery, A Warm Articulation will be on view in West Hollywood from February 11 - March 11, 2023, with an opening reception on February 11th from 5-8pm.
Victoria Morton draws on a range of sensory experience – both direct and mediated – to create associative quasi-abstract paintings that address “a heightened perception of the fragmented self in relation to day-to-day consciousness.” Translucent pools of color, sweeping gestural passages, geometric, diagrammatic outlines, pointillist micro-compositions and an array of other painterly incidents and phenomena make up Morton’s compositions. Within them we might be witnessing the spectral afterlives of figures, architectural structures and landscapes as they exist in the miasma of memory. Imagery can seem caught, half seen, or as if reflected in moving water. In Al Lago (2022), what appears to be a fragment of a house emerges from washes of blue and purple, while the contours of a leaning figure materialize in Pool and Forest (2022). Both paintings suggest the unstable perceptual experience of being under water, but rather than delivering a specific narrative, Morton offers affective situations for each viewer to encounter differently upon each engagement.
At times Morton directly references art history; the composition and atmosphere of Giovanni Bellini’s St Francis in the Desert (1480), for instance, informs Multiple Box Motion (2022). Morton is also compelled by the structure, space, and volume in Giotto, and by Mondrian’s geometry. But the artist is also drawn to textiles, sculpture, choreography and music as influences on her work. (The gauzy A Warm Articulation (2022) began as an interpretation of 15th century dance diagrams.) A practicing musician herself, Morton is attentive to the visual equivalents of aural tone, duration, rhythm, pitch, harmony, discord, counterpoint, etc.
The present exhibition sees the artist’s return to the triptych structure, with both Multiple Box Motion and Disentanglement (2022) featuring large central panels flanked by wings. The central composition of Multiple Box Motion is intricately layered, bringing to abstraction a level of detail usually associated with representational paintings. In Disentanglement, loose geometry evokes a kind of interior non-space. (Morton speaks of “negative paintings,” whose illusionism is recessive rather than repoussé). The triptychs in particular concretize Morton’s overall interest in framing, formatting, compartmenting, constructing and deconstructing. Such interests are manifest in all her works as an investigation, at physical but also psychological and philosophical levels, of containment and the uncontainable.
--
Victoria Morton (b. 1971, Glasgow, lives and works in Glasgow and Fossombrone) studied at Glasgow School of Art. She has had solo exhibitions at Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK; Aird’s Lane Bricks Space, Glasgow, SCT; The Modern Institute, Glasgow, SCT; Etro, London, UK; Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo, JP; Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston, US, among many others. Her work is represented in collections worldwide, including The Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris, FR; MAK Architects, London, UK; RCM Royal College of Music Museum, London, UK; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, SCT; Museum Voorlinden, NL, San Francisco Museum of Art, US; and Glasgow Museum, SCT.