Rebecca Morris: Party Cut

This catalogue accompanies the exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey, September 6–October 19, 2013.

Rebecca Morris is an abstract painter of uncommon inventive powers. Her large canvases incorporate drawn elements—linear gesture, repetitive line, intimations of depth—but in a distinctly painterly manner, with great sensitivity to fracture and tonality. Indeed, drawing has always been a significant part of Morris’s process; she periodically takes time out to execute a body of drawings, and these highly coloristic works refresh and inspire her painting.

The catalogue collects works from her first exhibition at Corbett vs. Dempsey: stunning new paintings and a survey of drawings dating back to the period in the mid 1990s, when she had just graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Dazzling and often quite humorous, Morris’s drawings show her special manner of using formal means to prod and pry at other kinds of meaning, be they connotative, emotional, or literal. Blocks of color, splatter, loose grids of varying line weight, washes and deft use of resist, occasional words and dates spelled in sweeping strokes—these are works that span available techniques and materials for potency and deliver the goods. The paintings are utterly delicious, compiling fragments into a constellation or luring with the possibility of resolution, then holding out, like a dissonant last chord.

Interview with the artist by John Corbett. Designed by Sonnenzimmer.

Published by Corbett vs. Dempsey, 2013, softcover, 64 pages, 9 x 7 inches.