13 May to 12 June, 2008

The Redfern Gallery are pleased to announce an upcoming retrospective exhibition of the work of Adrian Morris (1929-2004), a distinctive but overlooked British artist.

“Morris’s work speaks directly of the anxieties and hopes we now harbour about our planet’s state in the twenty-first century. There is an impressive level of consistency and rigour running through his mature output. It amounts to a formidable corpus of work. The paintings’ austere, hard-won and, above all, prescient eloquence deserves to be recognised today.” Richard Cork, 2008-04-22

“For me, painting has been an attempt to crease an environment in which life could exist,” Morris said of his work, which was included in an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery in London in 1978. In fact, his major themes arise from his quest to “find life in the dust” – dormant life in the often uncompromising crust of our own and distant planets.

In the 1960’s his images are of remote, sun-baked plains with the diffusion of life-giving water into sand and clay under a fleckless blue sky. Then follows internal views from what seems to be a porthole or inspection hatch onto a mysterious outside world which often bears the scars of man’s activities – of habitation, of industry and of war.

Lone figures of refugees or even astronauts occasionally appear, but more often it is their absence that is more apparent – a trace element of DNA gradually being eroded by the passage of time, but never completely being extinguished.

From the eighties onwards, Morris’s paintings depict buildings and interiors – doorways and windows – the images tense and still; and finally there is a return to landscape, barren land on Mars where nonetheless life could still perhaps exist.

Born in London, Morris spent his early childhood in rural Somerset before relocating with his family to the USA in 1941. He attended the progressive Putney School in Vermont where his talent for painting was fully encouraged. Returning to England in 1947, he studied briefly at the Anglo-French Art Centre before serving in the British Army from 1948-1950. He then completed four years study at The Royal Academy Schools.

Although little-known in his lifetime, Morris enjoyed the admiration and respect of fellow artists and the few art professionals who were permitted into his studio. For him, painting was a private art and he exhibited and sold only rarely.

He had a solo exhibition in the St.George’s Gallery, London in 1955 and his work has been in a number of mixed shows in London galleries (including the Hanover and Leicester) as well as a group of 16 paintings in the Hayward Annual ’78 where he showed alongside artists including Sandra Blow, Elisabeth Frink, Stephen Cox and Michael Sandle.

The exhibition will run from 13 May to 12 June, 2008. A catalogue is available with essays by Richard Cork and Salomon Resnik. For more information please contact Richard Gault on 0207 734-1732 or email richardg@redfern-gallery.comand Adrian Morris on www.redfern-gallery.com