Sarah Morris. All Systems Fail

The Kunstmuseum Stuttgart is dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to the internationally renowned artist Sarah Morris (born 1967, Sevenoaks, GB). The exhibition features over a hundred artworks—including paintings, drawings, film posters, immersive film installations, and a new site-specific wall painting—which foreground thirty years of groundbreaking work.

Sarah Morris is known for her paintings of vivid geometries that form new understandings of networks, systems, economies and architectures. Morris uses reality and abstraction in her paintings, which recall the realism of pop art, American minimalism, and institutional critique. The artist sees her paintings as self-generating, open to interpretation, depicting motion and change, giving viewers a heightened sense of their place within a system at large. 

In both her abstract paintings and her experimental films, Morris explores the psycho-geography and dynamic nature of cities in flux. Her cinematic portraits of cities create a chain of interrelation between locales and production. The exhibition title recalls the widespread pessimism about culture and progress, digitization of human interactions and failure of political and social structures in this contemporary moment.

The exhibition was organized by the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in collaboration with the Kunstmuseen Krefeld, the Zentrum Paul Klee, and the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart.