Painting Projects 2000-2005

Simon Morris has produced a significant body of site-specific works over recent years, ranging from the vast Stadia, mown into the pitch at Jade Stadium, Christchurch for the 2002 Art and Industry Biennial, to a series of wall paintings executed in response to and expanding upon a variety of architectural contexts, from gallery spaces to private houses to corporate offices.

Underpinning these works, as much as their formal elegance and economy, is their fundamental relationship to Morris’ painting practice. The site works develop from the more conventional modes of Morris’ painting, and their modes in turn find redeployment in that painting. Morris’ concerns with the possibilities of geometric abstraction, with its animation of space and time, and its responsiveness to the conditions of viewing and the viewer, is thus given an expansive and public form in such works.

The exhibition brings together examples of those site-specific works. Selected works in this mode will be reconfigured as wall paintings specifically developed for the Physics Room spaces, and presented alongside preparatory and documentary works.

Reviews, Essays & Articles
Art/Christchurch
The Guide, Sunday Star Times, 21 August 2005

Something of an art diary
Presto, October 2005
Wood, Andrew Paul.