Adrian Morris - Exhibitions and Critical Opinion

Exhibitions and Critical Opinion

Following a retrospective exhibition at the Redfern Gallery in London in May/June, 2008, works were included in their mixed Autumn exhibition, 2009. The gallery mounted a further show of his paintings and works on paper from 8 June to 29 July 2010. Most recently his works featured in a group show at the Redfern Gallery 'Landscape' - Paintings, drawings and prints by a number of artists including: Sir Terry Frost RA, William Gear RA, Sir Cedric Morris bt, and Patrick Procktor. The exhibition ran from 15 May to 31 July 2012.

♦ "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 precient eloquence deserves to be recognised today".

♦ "A distinctive and distinguished painter, his work is elusive of category, its own thing, minimal rather than minimalist, abstracted rather than abstract, worked always with a scrupulous address to the matter of the painting, not just as an image but as a thing".

♦ "Adrian Morris's work cannot easily be located in contemporary art...This image of pioneering work in remote places often acts as a metaphor of exploration into the mental or physical unknown or as the artist described it: 'Journeying out into space as far as the mind can go and one can physically follow, while at the same time retaining one's rots in the earth — man must and will migrate further'".

♦ "The images are tense and still, the paint rubbed into the gesso, layer on layer until it seems to become the material it depicts, metal and sand, amplifying the disquiet...Morris's imagery leads us to infer a somehow sacrosanct 'humanist' or 'existential' content.