Exhibition

George Morrison: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1950s–1960s

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Past

September 12—November 2, 2024

Opening Reception

Thursday, September 12, 6–8 PM

Location

Los Angeles

606 N Western Avenue

90004 Los Angeles CA

Tue, Wed, Thu, Fri, Sat: 10 AM-6 PM

Artist

George Morrison

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George Morrison, Untitled, 1953 (detail). © George Morrison Estate.

David Zwirner is pleased to announce an exhibition of works on paper and paintings by Ojibwe artist George Morrison (Grand Portage Band of Chippewa, 1919–2000), on view at the gallery’s 606 N Western Avenue location in Los Angeles. Organized in collaboration with the George Morrison Estate and Bockley Gallery, Minneapolis, this marks the first solo presentation of the artist’s work in Los Angeles.

A celebrated abstractionist, Morrison is known for compositions that convey the aesthetic, spiritual, and geographic influences of his birthplace and the fervent beginnings of abstract expressionism in New York in the 1940s and 1950s. Born and raised on the north shore of Lake Superior in Minnesota, Morrison moved to New York on scholarship in 1943. He traveled to France as a Fulbright Scholar in 1952; there, he continued to develop a signature style of abstraction that combined elements of expressionism, cubism, and surrealism.

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“My own sensibilities, the influences, and the attitudes that shaped my art were broad in scope…. I have never tried to prove that I was Indian thru [sic] my art; yet, there may remain deeply hidden some remote suggestion of the rock whence I was hewn, the preoccupation of the textual surface, the mystery of the structural and organic element, the enigma of the horizon, or the color of the wind.”

—George Morrison, artist statement, January 1972

George Morrison in his studio, Provincetown, 1965

Upon moving to New York in 1943 to begin his studies at the Art Students League, Morrison promptly entered the fold of the dynamic downtown art scene, forging close friendships with artists such as Franz Kline, Louise Nevelson, and Herman Cherry, and becoming acquainted with contemporaries including Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock. Incorporating aspects of cubism and surrealism, Morrison’s decidedly abstract expressionist style invokes an intuitive subtlety with colors and textures while demonstrating a deep understanding of the interconnected effects of light and form.

“Morrison matured as an artist in New York in a surrealist–abstract expressionist context that valued starting automatically and relying on intuition, improvisation, and chance.... Morrison reinvented himself each and every day in the studio through the act of painting.”

—W. Jackson Rushing Ill, Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison, 2013

Installation view, George Morrison: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1950s–1960s, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2024

The works in this exhibition date mostly to the 1950s—a significant, generative, and itinerant period in Morrison’s early career, when the artist lived and worked primarily in New York and elsewhere on the East Coast. He had spent a formative year in France on a Fulbright Scholarship from September 1952 until the fall of 1953, where he studied in Paris, Aix-en-Provence, and Antibes. He worked frequently on paper, using ink wash, gouache, tempera, and occasionally oil, and considered these small works as important as his larger-scale paintings on paper and canvas, with each practice informing the other throughout his career.

George Morrison in New York, 1954

Morrison had his first solo exhibition, featuring eighteen paintings, at Grand Central Moderns in New York in 1948. He had eight solo shows at the gallery through 1960. During this period, Morrison’s work was seen to defy stereotypes of what Native American art looked like; in 1948, his work was rejected from the Philbrook Art Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma, with the admonition “It was not painted in the traditional manner of your forefathers.”

For Morrison, landscape was inclusive of natural, built, and imagined realms. This exhibition highlights an important and migratory period during which his focus was abstraction, his aesthetic emphatically nonrepresentational.

George Morrison, Untitled: Abstract Drawing, 1951 (detail)

George Morrison, Untitled: Abstract Drawing, 1951 (detail)

 

“I am fascinated with ambiguity, change of mood and color, the sense of sound and movement above and below the horizon line. Therein lies some of the mystery of paintings: the transmutation, through choosing and manipulating the pigment, that becomes the substance of art.”

—George Morrison

Installation view, George Morrison: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1950s–1960s, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2024

As the scholar Matt Hooley notes, “For George Morrison, the elaboration of impossible meaning has a specific shape: the horizon line. It is an element in almost all of his work. Sometimes … the horizon is stark, marking the lower edge of the work’s top quadrant; at other times, it is almost indiscernible or is unusually positioned at the bottom of or askance a canvas….The horizon is what is always there anyway but that changes, and changes into and through, art.”

George Morrison, New York, 1957

“I let images emerge from the masses of paint. So there may be hidden associations that become real for me in the final mark.”

—George Morrison

George Morrison, Untitled, 1960 (detail)

George Morrison, Untitled, 1960 (detail)

 

Installation view, George Morrison: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1950s–1960s, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2024

“I always see the horizon as the edge of the world. And then you go beyond that, and then you see the phenomenon of the sky and that goes beyond also, so therefore I always imagine, in a certain surrealist world, that I am there, that I would like to imagine for myself that it is real.”

—George Morrison

Installation view, George Morrison: Paintings and Works on Paper, 1950s–1960s, David Zwirner, Los Angeles, 2024

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