Morgan Fisher: Films and Paintings and In Between and Nearby
24 February to 24 April 2011

This exhibition is the first to survey over forty years of the work of Morgan Fisher (born 1942, lives in Los Angeles). It is organised around the two major areas of Fisher’s work: his films – for which he first became known in the late sixties – and his work in painting, which began in the early nineties. The exhibition also includes installation work in film, painting and architecture, as well as video, photographs and works on paper.

Fisher’s films, usually grouped with the structuralist movement, explore their own means of production, examining the conventions that underlie film to generate radical new forms. His work in painting continues this strategy, examining the unspoken assumptions that have governed painting to create works that are no less radical.

The exhibition will include four of his celebrated 16mm films, as well as Color Balance (1980), a three-projector installation. Two rare works for monitors will also be shown, one for the first time. The exhibition will also include a range of Fisher’s other work, from his late-sixties spray-painted and Pepsi Case works to new paintings, painting installations and an architectural installation all made in response to the architecture of Raven Row.

Morgan Fisher made his first film in 1968, and his most recent in 2003. He began showing paintings and related work in galleries in the early nineties, and is currently represented by Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Cologne, and China Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles. In 2005 a survey of his films curated by Chrissie Iles, travelled from The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, to Tate Modern, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. His exhibition at Portikus, Frankfurt, in 2009 was a site-specific architectural installation that occupied the entire space.

The exhibition is curated by Alex Sainsbury. New essays by Christophe Gallois, Head of Exhibitions at Mudam, Luxembourg, and Stuart Comer, Curator of Film at Tate Modern will accompany the exhibition.