We are delighted to present Paul Morrison’s second solo exhibition at VAN HORN on the occasion of the DC Open Gallery weekend.

Another solo exhibition by the artist opens at Knust Kunz on the occasion of Various Others in Munich, where VAN HORN is invited as a guest gallery. The galleries have each produced a
different group of impressive sculptures by the artist, suitable for indoors as well as outdoors. At both venues, they will be shown for the first time in this pure form and give an impression of the range of his sculptural language.

In times of climate change and the enormous influence of man on nature, Paul Morrison’s works are more topical than ever, not least because of the artist’s consistent devotion to the pictorial subject of nature. In his scenes of flowers and trees, he combines styles and pictorial languages of different origins – from comics and graphic art to historical etchings from the Renaissance and scientific representations of botany. Morrison draws on the tradition of landscape painting that established itself as an independent genre in the 16th century and has not lost its relevance since then, from modernism to land art. Morrison expresses this topicality in expansive wall paintings, sculptures, paintings as well as in drawings, prints and cinematic works.

Sculpture is an integral part of Morrison’s practice. Large-scale paper cut like works in metal emphasise the pictorial and seem to dematerialise as the viewer circles the work. The delicacy of the contours of his sculptures often belies their overwhelming physical size and weight.

Morrison deliberately works with the displacement of scale, creating room-filling plant arrangements with which he creates formally reduced and at the same time surreal images of nature, which transform the space they occupy into a mapped garden. Thus we encounter his silhouette like works, for example, as a large-scale patch of forest or a larger-than-life clove, which do not follow any hierarchy, but instead playfully and at the same time precisely relate to the architecture that surrounds them.

Paul Morrison *1966, lives and works in Sheffield, UK, is a contemporary British artist known for the bold lines of his paintings, landscape panoramas and sculptural botanical arrangements in steel and aluminium, which already attracted international attention in the 1990s.

Photos Mystacidium, Rhizotron, Catalpa by Johannes Bendzulla