Victoria Morton: Vetrina
June 7-July 20, 2024
Opening Reception: Friday, June 7, 5–7pm
Artist Talk with Ali Gass at 5:30pm
Jessica Silverman is pleased to announce Victoria Morton’s “Vetrina,” the artist’s first solo presentation in San Francisco, June 7 to July 20, 2024. The show features a group of 26 new paintings made over the past year by one of Scotland’s foremost painters. The exhibition is inspired by the artist’s research at cultural sites in Bologna, including the city’s archeological museum, the Oratorio di Santa Cecilia, and Museo Della Specola—a historical observatory and astronomy museum. A series of small canvases will be installed on the gallery’s window-front wall, leading to a cycle of large-scale paintings in the main space to create a fluid and rhythmic ensemble that alludes to the painter’s simultaneous practice as a musician.
Morton’s immersive paintings bend perception between the physical and the psychic. Seemingly abstract compositions combine pools of color with gestural passages that flirt with figuration, engaging the viewer in a game of deciphering what one sees and what one imagines. In Cycles (2024), purple, pink, and blue atmospheric forms spectacularly bathe a bright yellow biomorphic object and hard-edge geometric elements.
Development A (2024) draws on Renaissance frescoes in the Oratorio di Santa Cecilia. Prisms of color and calligraphic linework unite and clash in a dramatic composition that alludes to narrative painting, landscape, and interior spaces. Figurative silhouettes and specters of language harmoniously emerge and retreat across the canvas. Through a choreographed push and pull in mark-making, Morton holds viewers in suspense.
Painting from her photographic documentation of the fresco cycles and their surrounding tourist merchandise, Cartoline (2024) depicts a looser interpretation of this site. Morton introduces another layer of critical distance by including surfaces and reflections inherent to the photographs themselves. Expanding and abstracting the composition, this playful drafting of a defined space hovers at the edge of definition.
Morton’s kinetic and radiating compositions are seductive propositions, inviting the viewer to explore conditions of visuality and experience states of paradox, uncertainty, and wonderment.
Victoria Morton (b. 1971, Glasgow, Scotland) obtained an MFA from Glasgow School of Art following her BA in Fine Art Painting. Morton’s work is in numerous public collections including SFMOMA, San Francisco; The Foundation Louis Vuitton, Paris; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland; and Royal College of Music Museum, London, UK. She has had solo exhibitions at Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, Boston, MA; Nino Mier, Los Angeles; The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow; and Sadie Coles HQ, London; amongst others. Her work has been included in group exhibitions at The Corn Hall, England; The Royal Glasgow Institute of Fine Arts, Scotland and Victoria Miro Gallery, London. She lives and works between Glasgow, Scotland and Fossombrone, Italy. Morton is represented by The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd, Glasgow, Scotland, and Sadie Coles HQ, London, UK.
