Samcheong, Seoul
Sarah Morris
Pinecones and Corporations
Gallery HyundaiGallery Hyundai is pleased to present Pinecones and Corporations, a solo exhibition of works by Sarah Morris. For more than 30 years, Sarah Morris (b. 1967) has used her singular, non-narrative visual language to explore the various mechanisms that make up urban environments, social networks, typologies, and power structures. Morris continually builds on a vast body of work that spans a range of different media including painting, film, site-specific murals and sculpture, posters, and drawings. Indeed, her current retrospective, All Systems Fail — now traveling from Hamburg’s Deichtorhallen to the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Zentrum Paul Klee, and Kunstmuseum Stuttgart — positions her as one of the most intriguing artists of her generation. Pinecones and Corporations is the artist's second solo exhibition in Korea in 13 years, since Clips, Knots, and 1972 at Gallery Hyundai in 2010. In Pinecones and Corporations, Sarah Morris presents the "pinecone" and the "corporation" as constituent parts of a seemingly oppositional environment. The organic characteristics of the pinecone, such as its morphological echo of the Fibonacci sequence and its ability to reproduce, here recall the workings of a corporation, the way it functions as both the backbone and driving force of various urban and social systems with its cyclical structure of producers (employees) and production (labor), commodities (capital), and factories (power). Paintings in the exhibition are divided into smaller groupings of pine trees, pinecones, and corporations; the specific object of each piece can be deduced from the characteristic iconography and titles. The exhibition also highlights three films: Strange Magic (2014), Abu Dhabi (2017), and Sakura (2018), which are multilayered reflections on cities from different cultures across Europe, the Middle East, and Asia—specifically Paris, Abu Dhabi, and Osaka, respectively.