Sarah Morris Jardim Botânico [Rio]   since 26.10.2013

Sarah Morris. Jardim Botânico [Rio]

The American artist and filmmaker Sarah Morris (born 1967) has created a monumental, panoramic mural for the central entrance hall of the Kunsthalle Bremen. Jardim Botânico [Rio] (Botanical Garden) is related to the artist’s new series of works entitled Rio but also reacts to the architecture of the museum.

The spectacular installation combines luminous colours and abstract grid structures with rectangular and curved forms to form a spectacular environment. The numerous layers of brilliant pigments and household enamels give rise to visual rhythms as well as to tactile, almost relief-like structures.

Morris' paintings and room-filling murals operate in the space between the modernist tradition of geometric-abstract art and contemporary design. Her compositions serve as a vehicle for the artist's reflections on everyday objects, industrial design, architecture and, above all, global metropolises, but also explore the illusory world and superficial aesthetic of the Hollywood film, glossy magazines, fashion and advertising.

Sarah Morris is internationally known both as a painter and filmmaker. From 1998 onward, she has created a series of painterly and filmic portraits of cities which are based on meticulous research. Her most recent works, for instance, are devoted to the processes of staging and transformation of Olympic cities such as those in Munich (2008), Beijing (2009), and Rio de Janeiro (Bye Bye Brazil, 2013). Filmic and photographic impressions often serve as the point of departure for her painterly compositions which, created digitally, may be read as analytical, abstract as well as intuitive translations. The titles of her paintings often refer to familiar buildings, plazas or names of cities. Her observations consistently remain aesthetic and fascinating; they condense the pulsating life of modern capitalism into pure form.