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Mali Morris was born in North Wales and studied Fine Art at the Universities of Newcastle upon Tyne and Reading.
Her first major solo exhibitions were at the Serpentine Summer Show 3, London, 1977, and the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1979. She has shown extensively since then in twenty-five solo shows, and has taken part in many group exhibitions, at the Whitechapel Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Hayward Gallery, and the Barbican in London, at the Walker in Liverpool, etc, and a number overseas.
There have been three solo shows in Tokyo, 2000, 2004 and 2005, and two at Robert Steele Gallery Project Room, New York, 2005 and 2007. Angel Row Gallery Nottingham organized a touring show in 2002-3. Mali Morris: Work From Four Decades was at the Poussin Gallery, London, in Nov/Dec 2005 and Mali Morris: New Paintings in May/June 2008.
Mali Morris’s work is in private, corporate and public collections worldwide, including the Arts Council England, British Council, Contemporary Arts Society, Government Art Collection, and the Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester. She has received awards from the Arts Council England, British Council, DAIWA Anglo-Japanese Foundation, GLAA, Elephant Trust, with Research Awards from the University of Reading and Chelsea College of Art and Design, and the Lorne Award. In May 2007 she was a prizewinner at Creekside Open x 2, selected by Emma Biggs and Matthew Collings.
She has taught and examined at many Departments of Fine Art, including the University of Reading, Royal College of Art, Slade School of Art, and Chelsea College of Art and Design, University of the Arts, London, where she was Senior Lecturer in Painting from 1991 – 2005.
Mali Morris lives and works in London.
Full c.v. available on request
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From the catalogue essay ‘Strange Links: Giude to Morris' 2008, by Matthew Collings, artist, writer, critic & broadcaster; author of This is Civilisation 2008
Mali Morris is a painter who makes you think about paint, and whose paint asks you to think about light. She is not concerned with making paintings represent recognisable objects, but the world, through light effects, is in her paintings... Her paintings are alive not just to a history of abstraction, but in a dialogue with her own method of experimentation. The issues seem to be light and rhythm, and what painting is.
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Loula 2008 51 x 76cm acrylic on canvas
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From the catalogue essay ‘The Singular and the Painterly: Mali Morris’s Recent Work’ 2002, by David Ryan, artist and writer, author of Talking Painting.
Mali Morris’s work thrives on the production of an extremely fresh image – one that is arrested from a fluid painterly process. Her paintings are concentrated, and such is their achievement of openness that they appear to elucidate a particular kind of looking, an individual relationship with the painterly ‘thing’…. Morton Feldman once suggested that one of the dilemmas for the artist was that of operating ‘in’ the work or ‘outside’ of it. Feldman’s own writings vividly testify to a working practice ensconsed in the stuff of materiality, of feeling one’s way and thinking through it. (He) eloquently articulated abstraction itself as a process, an experience between viewer (or listener) and the artwork. It does not reside in style or approach necessarily, but in the relationship between perceiver and perceived: “The abstract…. is not involved with ideas. It is an inner process that continually appears and becomes familiar like another consciousness. The most difficult thing in art is to keep intact this consciousness of the abstract.”
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Lap (Maroon/Yellow) 1998 40 x 50cm acrylic on canvas
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From the catalogue essay ‘Mali Morris; Paintings from Four Decades’ 2005, by Karen Wilkin, writer, curator and critic:
Often, the seemingly imposed swirls, coils, and dots of Morris’s recent images are made by wiping out, by removing, rather than adding pigment. The process creates unpredictable modulations of colour and also makes the “hovering” centralized events read as being simultaneously within and contiguous with their surroundings, a seeming contradiction that heightens the tension of the series. Morris’s comments on the process are the pragmatic responses of a serious working painter. “ taking away is another way of arriving at colour,” she says. “ I don’t want it to be a perceptual conundrum, but spatially I find it really interesting…. And it keeps me thinking ahead – it’s construction through seeing.”
Peeps 2006 31 x 41cm acrylic on canvas
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From the catalogue essay 'Mali Morris - Paintings 1994’ by Martha Kapos, writer and poet:
…The paintings have a simplicity of form that almost looks like emptiness….Yet the handling of surfaces, combining touch and light released by colour, as for example in Around, 1994 and Edge of a Portrait, 1994, creates a feeling of plenitude... Mali Morris has referred to the placing of this light as so suffused and ‘emanating’ as to appear to be ‘in front of the paintings or in the room’. ‘The presence of this luminosity, and its nature, are what determine the success or failure of a painting.’
Rose Red Shores 1994 187 x 83cm acrylic on canvas
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From the catalogue essay ‘Mali Morris – Recent Paintings’ 2003, by Geoff Rigden, artist.
…alongside the novel, The Towers of Trebizond, by Rose Macaulay, a seascape by Albert Marquet, a Gene Kelly dance sequence from On The Town, and a recorded disc by the jazz tenorist, Lester Young. With these artists she shares the combined gifts of understatement and authority, clarity, coolness and depth. Her work has never been clamorous nor overwrought and at its present stage is at its most radical, sublime and eloquent….
Waltzing 2005 12 x 16 cm acrylic on paper |
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... there is a silent intensity, all the more mysterious as we realise that what we are experiencing is light more than colour and space as much as forms......she has achieved this economy slowly, through years of intelligent, observant work.
Norbert Lynton, Contemporary Visual Arts, Issue 15
Breath 1997 171 x 197cm acrylic on canvas
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… I admired the shimmering transparency that Morris achieves in ‘Third Party’ (1979), now in a retrospective of her work since the 1970’s at Poussin Gallery.
Matthew Collings, Diary, Modern Painters, February 2006
Third Party 1979 208 x 139cm acrylic on canvas |
… Mali Morris is an artist to cherish, whose relaxed and candid paintings have an atmosphere in which nuance and bluntness co-exist.
Tim Hilton, The Guardian
Black Diamond Encircled 1989 99 x 142cm acrylic on canvas
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... and (yes, OK, my favourite) Mali Morris’ brilliant abstract, Plural on Red.
Charles Darwent, reviewing John Moores, Independent on Sunday 2002
Plural on Red 2002 40 x 51cm acrylic on canvas |
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All images © Mali Morris 2008 |
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APT Studios
6 Creekside
Deptford
London SE8 4SA
malimorris@talktalk.net
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