West, London
Ree Morton
Signs and Gestures
Richard SaltounRichard Saltoun Gallery is pleased to present Ree Morton: Signs and Gestures, the first UK solo exhibition dedicated to the American conceptual and feminist artist Ree Morton (1936-1977). A pioneering figure, Morton's work anticipates the turn towards installation, narrative, and performance that comes to define artistic practice in the 1970s. Born in 1936 in Ossining, New York, Ree Morton, a mother of three, graduates from art school in her 30s following a period as a nurse and housewife. Describing her evolution as 'the feminist classic of out of the kitchen; into the studio', she leads a brief but highly productive itinerant career, working and teaching across the United States before her sudden and untimely death at the age of 40. Situated within the context of emerging feminist discourse and shifting understandings of the role of women artists, Morton resists fixed categorisation. Her practice intersects with Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and feminist art, while maintaining a position independent of any singular movement. She plays with notions of the decorative in ways that deliberately disrupt the austere norms of Minimal and Post-Minimalist aesthetics, irreverently introducing vivid colour, ornamental gestures, and unexpected material flourishes. Over the course of a single decade, she develops a highly distinctive body of work that bridges conceptual rigor with personal experience. Morton critically engages with cultural constructions of femininity, including ideals of motherhood, fragility, decoration, and the "girlish". In 1974, she begins working with celastic--a malleable textile more commonly used in theatre--which she shapes into ribbons, banners, and flowers drawn from traditionally feminine visual vocabularies. Through this material, she develops a subversive visual language that both reclaims and destabilises decorative form, challenging hierarchies of medium while foregrounding the politics of female imagery. The exhibition brings together a focused selection of works from Ree Morton's brief yet prolific career, foregrounding the development of her practice across painting, drawing, and sculptural forms. It includes early canvases from 1970 that explore form and repetition in dialogue with post-minimalist concerns, alongside an example of large-scale cartographic work on paper, Game Map Drawing I-VI (1972-1973). The presentation then traces Morton's shift toward sculptural assemblage, where her use of wood and logs signals a decisive move away from conventional approaches to artmaking and toward a more expansive, materially driven practice. It culminates in two works from 1976, Regional Piece and Prince and Princess from the monumental installation Signs of Love, which articulate her turn toward personal narrative, kitsch imagery, and her distinctive use of celastic. Presented in collaboration with the Estate of Ree Morton, with the support of Allan Schwartzman, this is the first-ever solo presentation of Ree Morton in the UK.