VICTORIA MORTON

Sequenced in the Kingly Street gallery like tracks on an album, Victoria Morton’s new paintings are individually and collectively scored and orchestrated. The paintings in Oxygenic have diverse starting points, and their characteristics range from performative, flamboyant and detailed to quiet and spare. Painted in quick, instinctive sessions or slowly deliberated over across several months, this series reflects the ongoing enquiries within Morton’s deeply researched practice, as well as her transition into a new studio environment – one that has provided ‘more air, more room to breathe.’ Together the paintings evoke non-linear narratives. This new body of work reflects the latest in her continuing investigation into the language of painting and the coexistence of artistic analysis and felt experience.

Morton remains preoccupied with music and with the parallels between playing, recording and editing tracks and structuring paintings. Morton developed the exhibition as she was simultaneously finalising an album of her music.1 Titles such as Subcontrabass and Sympathetic Vibration allude to this connection and might evoke the warm acoustics of woodwind instruments and the brightness of brass. Nights Trees has a counterpart in a track of the same title featuring piano improvisation and electronics.

But Subcontrabass also references a photograph by Morton of an anonymous frescoed wall in Italy depicting the remnants of a seated Madonna or goddess figure. Indeed each of the works feature individual characteristics and a synthesis of disparate information. Furlo Pass displays a soft geometry which alludes both to formalist geometric abstraction and visualisation of sound, as well as to the ambience of a winter landscape.

Elsewhere, particular objects and environments catch her interest – a street sign, a vintage advert for beauty products, a natural gorge in Italy, a market stall or figures on a beach. Equally, art historical references can animate works. Comets pays homage to seventeenth-century scientific paintings by German astronomer Maria Clara Eimmart, giving form to the fleeting, un-bodily and evanescent.

Morton has stated that ‘...during the making of the paintings. A separate logic develops – the logic of the world of the painting.’ In this sense painting becomes a way for the artist to filter diverse references and approaches resulting in unpredictable outcomes. A simultaneous lightness and heaviness in Bathing invokes watery undercurrents and rocky landscapes. Through its clinically divided composition of half-primed and half-raw canvas, the painting reconciles dualities – crashing waves and hard terrain, bodily movement and stasis – balancing manifest expressionism with latency, a sense of waiting.

Relatedly, Switch Track embraces excess – energetic optical and semantic confluence. It began on the floor, on unprimed unstretched canvas. This tough, physical beginning resulted in a more heavily worked confrontational painting – a sort of journey through zones and passages.

Phoenix Drum, meanwhile, is realised like a mis-registered print, as if the layers could slide together into better focus. In another reading, it could be like a view from the inside of a camera.

Oxygenic, Morton’s largest exhibition to date with Sadie Coles HQ, marks both a summation of her achievements, and a range of new departures and ambitions.

Courtesy Sadie Coles HQ.