13 × 11 in
 in
 cm
$2,400
This drawing titled To Virginia With Love by Canadian artist Michael Morris, has a distinct resemblance to the London tube map. In 1965, Morris lived in London where he studied at the Slade School of Fine Art. He was intensely interested in the European avant-garde and, in particular, he followed the work of Richard Smith, an innovator in the British Art scene and early leader of British pop. This drawing coalesces a minimalist aesthetic with a pop sensibility in that it addresses modes of mass transportation in popular culture through restrained and intentional lines and shapes. Morris’ enduring interest in the grid is evidenced in this drawing where curved lines move through and around a central black square. When Morris returned to the west coast of Canada in 1966, he began his practice in hard edge painting and his geometric abstractions flourished. Eventually, Morris went on to co-found the Western Front in 1973, one of Canada’s first artist-run centres.
| Medium | Works on paper |
| Signature | Signed |
| Frame | Framed |
| Condition | good |
| Seller | Private |
| Location | Vancouver, Canada |
| Provenance | Winchester Galleries, Victoria, B.C; Private Collection, Vancouver. |
Born in Saltdean, England, Michael Morris immigrated to Canada with his mother in 1946 and settled just outside of Victoria. In his roles as curator and, primarily, as an artist, Morris was a key figure of the West Coast art scene from the 1960s to the present. Morris studied at the University of Victoria and then at the Vancouver School of Art (now Emily Carr University), followed by graduate studies at Slade School of Fine Art at the University College London, during the 1960s. There he became interested in the work of Fluxus and the European avant-garde, which had a profound influence on his work and on the Vancouver experimental art scene in general. In 1969 he founded Image Bank with Vincent Trasov, a system of postal correspondence between participating artists for the exchange of information and ideas. The intention of Image Bank was to create a collaborative, process-based project in the hopes of engendering a shared creative consciousness—in opposition to the alienation endemic to modern capitalist society—through the deconstruction and recombination of its ideological forms. Morris was acting curator of the Vancouver Art Gallery and the Centre for Communications and the Arts at Simon Fraser University and had many guest curatorships at other institutions. In 1973, he co-founded the Western Front—one of Canada’s first artist-run centres—and served as co-director for seven years. In 1990 he and Trasov founded the Morris/Trasov Archive, now housed at the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery, to research contemporary art. Morris has participated in artist-in-residence programs both in Canada at the Banff Centre (1990) and at Open Studio (2003) and internationally at Berlin Kunstlerprogramm (1981-1998). Morris has had solo and collaborative exhibitions nationally and internationally, and is the recipient of numerous awards, including the 2015 Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in Visual Arts, the 2011 Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts and an Honorary Doctorate from Emily Carr University.
Source: https://belkin.ubc.ca/remembering-michael-morris/
Tags
