Morgan Fisher: Paintings and Photographs

Born in 1942 in Washington, D.C., Morgan Fisher lives and works in Los Angeles. This American artist and filmmaker is famous for his structuralist and minimalist films. His first films were experimental works that identified with the structural film movement, emphasising the medium rather than the content. He then began criticizing the loss of creative media such as celluloid film, which, 40 years later, is still the principal theme of his drawings and photographs through which he addresses the obsolescence of traditional silver-based photography. Since the 1990s, Morgan Fisher's work has also expanded to include painting and installation.

Paintings and Photographs features two series of paintings, each one comprised of two series of four square canvases in different shades of grey, and six coloured rectangular canvases. The ensemble was made using an all-over technique in which the paint is spread out more or less homogenously over the whole surface of the canvas, and even appears to go outside the frame. The artist applies the colours one after the other directly from the tube. After applying each colour, he pivots the canvas to create random drips that gradually cover the entire surface. Despite its abstract nature, Morgan Fisher's painting always contains artistic references. While we can identify techniques from Jackson Pollock or Morris Louis's respective artistic practices, we should interpret the artist's intention with nuance. This is because Morgan Fisher does not seek any form of expressivity or aesthetic emotion whatsoever; his work is purely analytical and conceptual. Through the titles of his works, he indicates the specific process used, objectifying his action.

Photographic archival pigment prints complete the ensemble, depicting old film boxes or colour swatches used by photographers. These objects are doubly obsolete: first, because their use-by date has passed; and second, because they have vanished from modern-day use. They embody the non-creation of a project, of a photograph. By portraying them in this way, Fisher elevates technical objects that have fallen into dis-use into works of art, an inversion of status also applied by artists from the Pop Art movement.

Finally, at the heart of the exhibition is an installation that questions the interactions between works of art, the gallery space, and visitors. Three Gray Paintings, 2018, is an ensemble comprised of three monochromatic panels placed flat on pedestals, the title of which incites visitors to mentally conceptualise the grey obtained by combining the pairs of colors in the opposite sides of each panel.

The work of Morgan Fisher has been included three times at the Whitney Biennale (1985, 2004, and 2014). His work can be found in major international institutions such as the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) in Los Angeles, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, the Tate Modern in London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.