Sarah Morris: All Systems Fail

The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart is pleased to announce All Systems Fail, the most comprehensive exhibition of the work of acclaimed artist Sarah Morris (b. 1967). The retrospective, spanning thirty years of the artist’s practice, features over one hundred works—including paintings, drawings, a new wall painting, and her entire cinematic production to date—emphasizing the breadth of Morris’s reflections on a rapidly-changing world.

The exhibition title, All Systems Fail—at once hyperbolic, paradoxical, and prescient—alludes to the Anthropocene: the current era in which the effects of human activity, from industrialization to globalization, accelerate structural and environmental crises. From the digitization of human interaction to the widespread failure of political and social systems, Morris forms a new visual language through diagramming moments of transformation. Morris exists within a trajectory of artists responding to Pop art, Minimalism, and Institutional Critique, yet offers her own singular vision. The exhibition traces how the artist visually reimagines the psychologies and typologies of place.

Since the early 1990s, Morris has made works which transfigure the networks, systems, economies, architecture, and urban infrastructures. Throughout her practice, Morris’s vibrant, geometric compositions subvert the structural schematics of the Modernist grid, pointing to an economic structure. In the artist’s “cognitive maps,” as Morris describes her works, she shifts perspective, scale and color, reorienting the viewer within micro and macro cartographies. Morris translates the density of metropolises into an abstract language, creating a matrix of spatial and semiotic disorientation.

For All Systems Fail at Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Morris has conceived a large-scale wall painting Property which imagines a forested landscape of industrialized pieces, fastening together vertical forms.

The artist sees her paintings and films as open to interpretation, providing the viewer with a heightened sense of presence within a larger system. Her bodies of work draw on wide-ranging subject matter, including multinational corporations, transportation networks, digital mapping, office supplies, language, and lunar cycles, to name a few. In her sixteen films to date, Morris often focuses on the production of the spectacle in relation to moments of mundanity, including the Academy Awards (Los Angeles, 2004), carnival (Rio, 2012), and the Olympics (Beijing, 2008). Throughout her ongoing production of paintings and films, Morris points to the role of art in relation to propaganda.

Throughout Morris’s cinematic portraits, the artist locates moments of transformation and global exchange simultaneous to the distinct and multiple contexts of each point. Morris’s work centers the banalities, architectures, characters, events, and powers which encode contemporary cartographies, merging fiction and reality into a unique and distinct vision. Her films apprehend the psycho-geography of the city as an infinite, networked space. Through multi-layered and fragmented narratives, Morris explores the interrelations between locales, production, and systems of navigation.

For the first time in Europe, Morris will exhibit her latest film ETC, filmed in Hong Kong in the spring of 2023. The city, once a global economic center, has undergone drastic governmental, social and political changes and restrictions in the past years. The film’s title at once recalls the electronic teller card, an early digital banking system, and forms a shorthand for the continuation of Morris’s cinematic practice. As the artist says, her films are “a reference system for every painting that I have ever made and will ever make.”

The exhibition All Systems Fail was organized by the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in collaboration with the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.

Curator Ulrike Groos, Director Kunstmuseum Stuttgart / Assistant curator Stefanie Ufrecht, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart. The exhibition is generously supported by: MUSAGET / Marc Cain.

About the artist
Sarah Morris, born in 1967, lives and works in New York City. She is a graduate of Brown University, Cambridge University, and the Whitney Independent Study Program. Her work has been shown internationally in numerous solo and group exhibitions and is in many collections around the world, including Fondation Beyeler, Basel; Kunsthaus Zürich; LUMA Foundation, Arles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Musée d’Art Moderne, Paris; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Tate Modern, London; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart has two works by Sarah Morris in its permanent collection.

Publication
A monograph has been published by Hatje Cantz in German and English. This is the first comprehensive publication on Morris’s work—with newly commissioned essays by Bettina Funcke and Asad Raza and an interview by Christopher Bollen. Designed by Scott King and Tom Etherington.

Hatje Cantz Verlag, German / English, 320 pages, 508 illustrations, hardcover, ISBN 978-3-7757-5472-9, Retail price 48 EUR, price at the museum’s shop 40 EUR.