SARAH MORRIS: SNOW LEOPARDS AND SKYSCRAPERS
WHITE CUBE MASON’S YARD LONDON
SARAH MORRIS: SNOW
LEOPARDS AND SKYSCRAPERS
WHITE CUBE MASON’S YARD
LONDON
March 11,
2026 – May 9, 2026
Since the start of her
practice, Sarah Morris has examined the infrastructures, networks and
formations that condition the contemporary landscape, developing serial,
diagrammatic matrices that distil and index the systems of power in which we
are implicated. In ‘Snow Leopards and Skyscrapers’, the artist’s new series of
paintings takes the corporate entities of multinational conglomerates as its
point of departure: pharmaceutical corporations, data analytics firms and
transnational financial institutions – simultaneously abstracting and
representing the elusive powers that preside over, project and regulate the
present moment. Alongside the paintings, two film works, Midtown (1998)
and Chris Rock (2025), frame Morris’s earliest and most recent
engagements with the medium, articulating her preoccupations with the
architectures, subjectivities and atmospheres that these systems manifest.
Conceived and filmed in
1998, at the outset of what now spans 30 years of collaboration between the
gallery and Morris, the artist’s debut film Midtown, first shown at Museum
Ludwig in Cologne, unfolds as an immersive and fragmentary depiction of Midtown
Manhattan. Shot over the course of a single day, the film maps the coordinates
surrounding the artist’s first studio on 42nd Street – a corridor that sits
wedged between the vertiginous ranks of Midtown’s corporate towers, the
lingering marquees of its infamous pre-digital pornography hub, and the relentless,
hyper-illuminated address of Times Square. Morris’s films are all set to a
unique score by Liam Gillick, composed independently of the image with modular
units and later placed alongside the footage. Driven by an insistent
tempo, Midtown lingers on surfaces, lights and anonymous passers-by,
coalescing into something of a visual manifesto for the artist.
Drawing on the same index that informed Morris’s early series of ‘Midtown’
paintings (1998–2001), the film cuts between light-flooded billboards, the imposing
facades of JPMorgan Chase, Revlon, Viacom, the Seagram Building and Lever
House, and the steady stream of people on the street – ‘characters’ who, under
the camera’s gaze, become momentarily legible as they pass through the frame.
Described by the artist in 1999 as a ‘condensed manifesto’ of both her work to
date and future productions, the film consolidates many of Morris’s enduring
concerns, foregrounding her unique methodology of non-linear assemblage: of
situations and places as they exist in time. As Morris remarked, ‘I compile a
fragmented view of the urban world. Not the aesthetic of high modernism, but
the fragmentary experience that results’.1
Ironically invoking the exhibition’s title, which makes reference to Peter
Matthiessen’s famous 1978 travel account of his journey to Nepal’s remote Dolpo
region in pursuit of the elusive snow leopard, Morris instead positions the
viewer in the urban jungle. Her paintings claim no singular orientation or
straightforward fidelity to the subjects their titles identify: Black
Rock (2025), The Four Seasons (2026), Johnson &
Johnson (2025), Palantir (2026), JP Morgan (2025). In
their precise geometric configurations and hyper-saturated palettes, they extend
the Capitalist Realism associated with Gerhard Richter, as well as the work of
Andy Warhol and Donald Judd, artists with whom Morris has long felt an
aesthetic and conceptual affinity. Much as Warhol interrogated the commodity
form through repetition and serial display, in Morris’s practice each series
generates the next to form a self-reflexive network that echoes the
self-perpetuating visual economies of corporate branding, institutional
architecture and commercial display.
Throughout her paintings, Morris has remained committed to readymade gloss
paint as her primary medium: a choice that serves to underscore the objective
gesture of the commercial form. The finished surfaces are accordingly sleek,
uniform and seemingly machinic in their appearance, their meticulous sequencing
of dots, dashes, shards and parallelograms reinforcing an impression of
mechanical reproduction, commercial manufacture and language itself. This
apparent immediacy nevertheless belies the truth of the labour embedded within
each work, which are in fact the outcome of the artist’s slow, exacting and
rigorous production.
In this respect, Morris’s paintings recall, too, Francis Picabia and his wry
mobilisation of the machine as a form of portraiture. Where, in Picabia’s work,
mechanical diagrams served as unlikely proxies for human character, Morris
adopts a comparable strategy. Her paintings are not portraits of institutions
as such, but of the networks and ideologies they represent. ‘The building has
always been the pretext’, Morris states. ‘It’s actually the flow of capital and
data; that’s the image I’m after. What I want to create is an after-image, an
after-taste of this thing that is elusive, that is hard to know where the
boundaries start and stop.’2 Playing a form of monopoly with her paintings,
Morris introduces a subtle inversion of power, contending with and
‘avatarising’ structures long coded as male. It is within this framework that
the artist situates her practice alongside a broader lineage of institutional
critique associated with artists such as Hans Haacke.
Morris’s most recent film, Chris Rock (2025), offers a personal,
behind-the-scenes portrait of the American stand-up comedian, actor, writer and
producer, moving between Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre and his loft in
Downtown New York. An exchange between the artist and Rock, the work stands
within a long line of filmic portraits in which the artist has turned her
attention to individuals within their cities and the prospective nature of
their work, including Robert Towne, Alexander Kluge and Dr Georg Sieber.
In Chris Rock, the comedian reflects on his early career and the various
influences that inform his voice – from the American rapper Ice Cube to the
televangelist Joel Osteen – weaving these reflections alongside a series of
anecdotes and glimpses of the city. Throughout, the film moves between the
rehearsed and the improvised: phone calls from fellow comedians and celebrities
interrupt conversations; moments of candour sit alongside gestures of
self-conscious display. One particular anecdote concerns his grandfather, a
preacher who would rehearse his weekly sermons while driving his cab, prompting
Rock to liken the sermon to stand-up. The story resurfaces later in the film,
repeated with the same impromptu delivery. ‘The element of the performative is
present throughout all of my films. It’s there in the Olympics […] You could
say when you see Clinton whistling on the South Lawn of the White House. That’s
performative for the press’,3 Morris discerns, drawing a parallel with earlier
projects including Beijing (2008), Capital (2000)
and Los Angeles (2004).
The performative nature of the works in this exhibition, and of Morris’s oeuvre
more broadly, constitutes an examination of significations and spectacle, and
of how individuals and environments alike mediate, rehearse and circulate their
own image. Through these surfaces, the viewer is confronted with the vast
organisational systems regulating the spaces we inhabit – the corporations,
institutions and networks that, though perceived as distant or abstract, govern
the terms of our existence. ‘It all comes down to production’, Morris has
remarked. ‘The production of space, the production of brands, the production of
art. The production of dreams and desire, are paradoxically intangible at the
end of the day.’4
Sarah Morris was born in 1967 in the UK and lives and works in New York. She
has exhibited extensively and internationally, including solo exhibitions at
Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2026); Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany
(2024); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (2024); Tai Kwun Contemporary,
Hong Kong (2024); M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2024); Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany
(2023); Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich, Germany (2023); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg,
Germany (2023); Jesus College, Cambridge, UK (2019); Ullens Center for
Contemporary Art, Beijing (2018); Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2017); M
Museum, Leuven, Belgium (2015); Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany (2013); Wexner
Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2012); Fondation Beyeler, Basel,
Switzerland (2008); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands
(2006); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2001); and
Modern Art Oxford, UK (1999). Group exhibitions include ArtCenter College of
Design, California (2024); Frac Sud – Cité de l’art contemporain, Marseille,
France (2024); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2023);
Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin (2023); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2022);
Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021); 1st Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale,
Saudia Arabia (2021); Albertina Modern, Vienna (2020); FRONT Cleveland
Triennial for Contemporary Art (2018); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York
(2017); Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London (2003); 25th Bienal de São Paulo
(2002); and 4th Site Santa Fe Biennial, New Mexico (2001), among many others.
1‘Sarah
Morris Interviewed’, in Sarah Morris: Modern World, Museum
of Modern Art, Oxford, 1999, n.p.
2 Artist
conversation, unpublished, February 2026
3 Artist
conversation, unpublished, February 2026
4 Sarah
Morris, ‘Strange Magic’, 2014
https://www.whitecube.com/gallery-exhibitions/sarah-morris-masons-yard-2026
BANK OF
CHINA, 2025
Household
Gloss Paint on Canvas
Dimensions:
289.2 x 582.4 cm | Overall: 113 3/4 x 229 1/4 in.
289.2 x 289.2 cm | Diptych, each: 113 7/8 x 113 7/8 in.
Artworks © the Artist. © 2026 White Cube
BLACKROCK,
2025
Household
Gloss Paint on Canvas
Dimensions:
207.6 x 152.4 cm | 81 3/4 x 60 in.
Artworks © the Artist. © 2026 White Cube
JOHNSON &
JOHNSON, 2025
Household
Gloss Paint on Canvas
Dimensions:
207.6 x 152.4 cm | 81 3/4 x 60 in.
Artworks © the Artist. © 2026 White Cube
PALANTIR,
2026
Household
Gloss Paint on Canvas
Dimensions:
153.0 x 152.4 cm | 60 1/4 x 60 in.
Artworks © the Artist. © 2026 White Cube
THE FOUR
SEASONS, 2026
Household
Gloss Paint on Canvas
Dimensions:
122.6 x 247.2 cm | Overall: 48 1/4 x 97 1/4 in.
122.6 x 122.6 cm | Diptych, each: 48 1/4 x 48 1/4 in.
Artworks © the Artist. © 2026 White Cube
MISREGISTRATION,
2026
Household
Gloss Paint on Canvas
Dimensions: 290.5 x 213.4 cm | 114 3/8 x 84 in.
Artworks © the Artist. © 2026 White Cube
DEPARTMENT OF
WAR, 2025
Household
Gloss Paint on Canvas
Dimensions:
207.6 x 152.4 cm | 81 3/4 x 60 in.
Artworks © the Artist. © 2026 White Cube
JP MORGAN,
2025
Household
Gloss Paint on Canvas
Dimensions: 65
2/5 × 48 in | 166.1 × 121.9 cm
Artworks © the Artist. © 2026 White Cube
SARAH MORRIS
Since the mid-1990s,
Sarah Morris has been making abstract paintings and films to investigate what
she describes as “urban, social and bureaucratic typologies”. These works,
based on different cities, are derived from close inspection of architectural
details combined with a critical sensitivity to the psychology of a city and
its key protagonists.
Morris began her career
making graphic paintings that adapted the dramatic, emotive language used in
newspaper and advertising tag lines. Her city-based paintings are executed in
household gloss paint on square canvases, employing rigorous, all-over grids
that reference architectural motifs, signs or urban vistas. Their vivid colours
derive from each city’s unique vocabulary and palette, but, most importantly,
its dynamic. In her film work, Morris both seduces and alienates the viewer,
employing different kinds of cinematography, from documentary recording to
seemingly set-up narrative scenarios. In her film Los Angeles (2005),
for instance, Morris explores an industry fuelled by fantasy and examines the
trenchant relationship between studio, producer, director and talent.
In Capital (2000), part of Morris‘s series about Washington DC,
Morris gained unprecedented access to the inside workings of Clinton's last
days in office.
Following Los Angeles, Morris embarked on more intimate portrait films,
such as Robert Towne (2005) and 1972 (2008), which shift
the viewpoint from the panorama of a city to an individual portrait of one of
its protagonists, as a way of examining it from the inside out. Following these
works, Morris made Beijing (2008), a film about one of the most
intricate and ambiguous international broadcasted events of past years – the
2008 Olympic Games.
Morris's more recent series of work about Rio de Janeiro depicts the
multifarious and complex layers of this most contradictory of cities, from its
highly orchestrated and eroticised surface image, to its vast urban sprawl. In
the new series of Rio paintings (2012-13), Morris both expands and
reduces her abstract compositions, and in the Rio film (2012), images
of the city’s beaches, fruit stands, hospitals, iconic modernist architecture,
football stadiums, factories and favelas are combined with images from the
office of Oscar Niemeyer, the mayor of Rio and the parades of the city's famous
Carnival.
In 2014, Morris's focus shifted to Paris in the film Strange Magic, in
which the artist explores a wide spectrum of narratives that operate under the
umbrella of the Louis Vuitton Moët Hennessy conglomerate. Commissioned for the
opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, the film, like Morris’s
paintings, looks to decode the built environment, exploring cultural, economic
and social typologies. Deconstructing the machinery behind France’s most
desired commodities – champagne, perfume, fashion – the artist probes concepts
of national identity and the inherent fantasy in the pursuit of luxury. As
Morris has said of the work: "It all comes down to production. The
production of space, the production of brands, the production of art. The
production of dreams and desire, paradoxically intangible at the end of the
day."
Sarah Morris was born in 1967 in the UK and lives and works in New York. She
has exhibited extensively including solo exhibitions at Zentrum Paul Klee,
Bern, Switzerland (2024); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2024); M+ Museum,
Hong Kong (2024); Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany (2023); Espace Louis Vuitton,
Munich, Germany (2023); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2023); Jesus College,
Cambridge, UK (2019); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2018); Espoo
Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2017); M Museum, Leuven, Belgium (2015);
Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany (2013); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio
(2012); Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland (2008); Museum Boijmans van
Beuningen, Rotterdam (2006); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005); Hamburger Bahnhof,
Berlin (2001); and Modern Art Oxford, UK (1999). Group exhibitions include Frac
Sud – Cité de l’art contemporain, Marseille, France (2024); Carnegie Museum of
Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2023); Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin (2023);
Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2022); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021);
1st Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Saudia Arabia (2021); Albertina
Modern, Vienna (2020); FRONT Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2018);
Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); Tate Triennial, Tate Britain,
London (2003); 25th Bienal de São Paulo (2002); and 4th Site Santa Fe Biennial,
New Mexico (2001), among many others.
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