Sarah Morris seated in front of her diptych Bank of China (2025)
Household gloss paint on canvas (289.2 x 582.4 cm) [1]
Ogni pittore dipinge sé ...[2]
I.
It's said that just as dog owners often resemble their pets, painters often resemble their canvases.
In fact, there's even a term for the tendency of artists to either consciously or subconsciously replicate their own physical features, personality, or emotional state in their work: automimesis ...
An obvious example would be Van Gogh, whose impasto brushstrokes and vibrant colour combinations transform landscapes into surging, swirling (somewhat sensual) expressions of his own soul. One of D. H. Lawrence's criticisms of Vincent's landscapes was that they were too subjective; "himself projected into the earth" [2].
Thus, even if they never paint a self-portrait per se, it's always interesting to consider how an artist mixes his or her colours and applies paint to the canvas.
II.
I was reminded of this concept of automimesis a few days after attending a new solo exhibition by British-born American artist Sarah Morris at the White Cube gallery in Mason's Yard (London).
For it was only after seeing a photograph of her - staring at the camera with a ferociously defensive look in her eye - that somehow the paintings in the exhibition made sense and I began to appreciate Morris's large canvases much more than when I was actually standing in front of them and feeling a little dazzled by their intense, hard-edged colour and diagrammatic character.
If, on the one hand, the exhibition is a meditation on the signs, symbols and structures of contemporary power as manifested in her hometown of New York City, so too is it a cognitive and emotional mapping of her own identity as shaped by the urban landscape and what Mark Fisher termed capitalist realism [4].
We journey into the world dominated by global corporations, pharmaceutical giants, large hotel chains, big brands, etc., but we care less ultimately about the steel and glass skyscrapers and more about the mysterious snow leopard who is, perhaps, Morris's totem animal [5] (and not merely the flow of money and data).
We feel about tower blocks and high-rise buildings what Lawrence felt about Egyptian pyramids and the great cathedrals of his native land: "we are weary of huge stone erections, and we begin to realise that it is better to keep life fluid and changing than to try to hold it fast down in heavy monuments" [6].
Burdens on the face of the earth, are man's ponderous erections, says Lawrence [7]. And one suspects that Morris would agree (and would approve of Lawrence's language, as she seems to think of capitalist realism as phallocratic or male-encoded in character).
Thus, her paintings - whilst imposing in their own way - at the same time decode and deconstruct the impositional character of the built environment by abstractly transforming corporate entities such as BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase, and Johnson & Johnson into vibrant, geometric artworks that speak not only of their hegemony, but of her cold determination to survive and her refusal to be trapped or enclosed by systems not of her making.
III.
Morris is obviously dedicated to her work: she has spent thirty years investigating what she describes as urban, social and
bureaucratic typologies and producing her unique cityscapes executed in brightly-coloured household gloss paint on large square
canvases:
"The finished surfaces are accordingly sleek, uniform and seemingly
machinic in their appearance, their meticulous sequencing of dots,
dashes, shards and parallelograms reinforcing an impression of
mechanical reproduction, commercial manufacture and language itself.
This apparent immediacy nevertheless belies the truth of the labour
embedded within each work, which is in fact the outcome of the artist's
slow, exacting and rigorous production." [8]
Interestingly, Morris speaks of capturing after-images rather than representations; i.e., images that continue to haunt her imagination and which she can see in her mind's eye even after she has ceased to look at the actual object. That makes sense, when one recalls that her paintings are essentially concerned with forces and flows rather than forms of architecture.
She also insists that all great art is a form of trespassing ... By which I think she means defying authority, overstepping boundaries, and making unauthorised copies of origami crease patterns ... [9]
Notes
[1] This canvas is included in the exhibition Snow Leopards and Skyscrapers (11 March - 9 May 2026) at White Cube Mason's Yard (London SW1).
[2] Ogni pittore dipinge sé: Every painter paints themselves.
As Benjamin Breen informs us in an interesting piece published on his Substack: Res Obscura (11 July 2023), the earliest attributed source for this proverbial Italian expression is Cosimo de Medici, the Florentine banker and arts patron.
The concept of automimesis is one discussed at length by Leonardo da Vinci in his Treatise on Painting and modern art historians remain fascinated by this idea.
[3] D. H. Lawrence, 'Introduction to These Paintings', Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 201.
[4] I suspect that Fisher would probably argue of Morris's work what he argued of Warhol's - Warhol being an artist with whom Morris has long felt an aesthetic and conceptual affinity - namely, that it's less a critique of capitalist realism and more a brilliant reflection and extension of the latter, further neutralising our ability to stand outside or imagine an alternative.
[5] It should be noted that Morris borrows the idea of a snow leopard from Peter Mattheissen's book The Snow Leopard (Viking Press, 1978); the zen-inspired story of a search for something that probably isn't there, or, if it is there, doesn't want to be seen or captured.
[6] D. H. Lawrence, Sketches of Etruscan Places, in Sketches of Etruscan Places and Other Italian Essays, ed. Simonetta de Filippis (Cambridge University Press, 1992), p. 32.
[7] Ibid. My italics.
[8] Quoted from the White Cube press release for the exhibition: click on the link above in note 1.
[9] In 2011, Morris was sued by a group of six origami artists, including Robert J. Lang, who alleged that in a significant number of works in her Origami series of paintings she had - without permission or giving credit - copied their original crease patterns, coloured them with paint, and then exhibited (and sold) them as found designs or traditional patterns.
The case was settled out of court early in 2013; under the terms of the settlement, the creators of the crease patterns are now given credit when the works are displayed or reproduced, which seems fair enough, I suppose, although I'm very sympathetic to the argument of transformative fair use and don't like notions of intellectual property and copyright, etc.
