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SARAH MORRIS
Born London, 1967. Lives in New York and London
Midtown (Seagram Building), 1998
Oil on canvas, 183 x 183 cm
Collection of The Consortium, Dijon, France (stored at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Strasbourg)
This painting forms part of the Midtown series begun in 1997, inspired by the facades of New York skyscrapers, of which the artists preserves only the main lines reduced to coloured checkerboards. Devoid of all human presence, these modernist grid patterns or geometric abstractions, incorporate both pop and op art, the cinematographic and psychedelic. Yet these basic schemes, with their bright colours, also manifest a disturbing seductiveness - something between a celebration of capitalist anonymity and a billboard from which the poster has gone missing. More precisely, they form a visual impression reminiscent of the progressive dream of an architect working with coloured glass (such as Paul Scheebart) and finally create an abstraction of reality, as if behind the suprematist or constructivist plans for a simplification of the world through art, moving in an opposite direction, there lies a reality that has been rendered abstract solely to make reference to itself.
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