VICTORIA MORTON

As Fyfe alludes to in his newly commissioned text, a key aspect of Victoria Morton’s exhibition Hitting the Lift is the artist’s ability to draw apparently disparate elements together, allowing space for correspondences and associations across media. The presentation mixes paintings – some dense and busy with activity, others spare and focussed, holding or framing more singular gestures – with a listening zone where visitors can take in new music via tape decks and headphones.

Experimentation, accumulation and layering unite these musical and visual practises. Both are the result of accreted influences and their ambience is infused with the artist’s studio and its surrounds. The paintings come first, with the listening area located at the end of the gallery. They vary in size, density and format – some mimicking the vertical formats of East Asian ink wash paintings while others correspond more closely to the scale of Post-War abstraction. Many feature collaged items and studio objects, with dried oil paint, clothes pegs, sections of aluminium, or additional canvas populating their varied surfaces. They feel part of the world, rather than a window out of it. Letters are occasionally discernible too. Some have a hint of a Rorschach test, with silhouettes mirrored and pigmented areas soaking into the canvas and blooming.

The exhibition moves the viewer from silence to sound and back, with the tape cassettes allowing for the artist’s music to filter into the reception of the paintings, or perhaps to coexist with them. On one tape there are two dub versions of a track called Hitting the Lift, mixed by Luke Fowler. The title alludes to the goods lift that leads to Morton’s studio. The other tape features a track called Vita Minerals, also mixed by Fowler. The composition includes improvised instrumentation and various field recordings made in the same goods lift. The concertina doors become an industrial instrument, its noises occasionally mingling with natural sounds from the yard outside. Versions of both tracks feature on Morton’s Grow Easy Love LP, released under the moniker Onde de Bouche. Visitors can listen to this on a turntable located by the entrance, in the gallery’s bookshop.

Based between Glasgow and Fossombrone, Italy, Victoria is an artist and musician whose innovative work across disciplines spans over three decades. Known for her explorative and expansive approach to painting, she has also undertaken collaborations, residencies and commissions extending into sculpture, textiles, sound and costume design. Her work as a visual artist sits alongside her musical practice both solo, under the moniker Onde de Bouche, and in many collective initiatives, such as Elizabeth Go, the all female band Muscles of Joy, and the ongoing music project Sotto Voce with Luke Fowler. Selected solo exhibitions include: ‘Oxygenic’, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2026); ‘Switch Track’, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (2025); ‘Vetrina’, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco (2024) ‘Double Shuffle’, Kerlin Gallery, Dublin, (with Merlin James) (2023); ‘SLEEP LINE’, The Modern Institute, Aird’s Lane Bricks Space (2021); ‘Pedal Point’, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021); ‘Treat Fever with Fever’, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2019); The Modern Institute, 3 Aird’s Lane, Glasgow (2014); ‘Mouth Wave’, Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo (2014); ‘Tapestry (Radio On)’, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2012); Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2010); and ‘Sun By Ear’ (with Katy Dove), Tramway, Glasgow (2007).

Selected group exhibitions include: ‘EK’, Glasgow Project Room, Glasgow (2025); ‘Rupture, Rapture: Womxn in Collage’, 16 Nicholson Street, Glasgow (2023); ‘Abstraction Now’, The Corn Hall, Diss (2022); ‘Off the Beaten Track’, Baton Gallery, Seoul (2022); ‘I Know Where I’m Going – Who Can I Be Now’, The Modern Institute, 14–20 Osborne Street, Glasgow (2021); ‘Fieldwork’, 42 Carlton Place, Glasgow (2020); ‘Foundation Painting Show’, British Heart Foundation, Glasgow International, Glasgow (2018); ‘What You Do, I Like’, Hospitalfield Arts, Arbroath (2018); ‘Surface Work’, Victoria Miro, London (2018); ‘Von Pablo Picasso bis Robert Rauschenberg Schenkung Céline, Heiner und Aeneas Bastian Hommage à Ingrid Mössinger’, Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz, Berlin (2017); ‘Out of the Frame: Scottish Abstraction’, The McManus: Dundee’s Art Gallery & Museum, Dundee (2016); ‘Generation: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland’, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2014); ‘That Petrol Emotion’, Metropolitan Art Society, Beirut (2014); ‘A Picture Show’, GOMA, Glasgow (2013).

Courtesy The Modern Institute.