Morgan Fisher

The exhibition entitled “Edge And Corner Paintings” shows a new group of paintings by the American artist Morgan Fisher. The dimensions and hanging of the paintings, all of them triangular are defined by the gallery ́s architecture. The shapes are literally taken from the length of the door and window edges and the corners of the walls or ceilings where the doors or windows are situated. All of the paintings are monochrome grey so their status is no painting and each painting, which is also providing an abstracting function in the context of this show.

Fishers paintings demonstrate a new definition of the “shaped canvas“. His “shaped canvases” do not justify themselves through artistic will, which prevailed in the 60s paintings of Ellsworth Kelley or Frank Stella and meant a “new form“ of canvases. Rather, Fisher is starting from a phenomenological discourse about the medium “picture“ whose starting points are the limitations of reality, a perception of the bounding of material space and shifting perspectives thereof.

Morgan Fisher first became well known as a filmmaker in the late 1960s. He produced his first site specific paintings in 2002, for his solo exhibition “To See Seeing” at the NAK in Aachen: six L-shaped grey canvases, that related to doorways, passages and windows of the exhibition space. The proximity of that work to Gerhard Richter’s grey paintings was intentional, but this latest series of “Edge and Corner Paintings” intensifies the relationship between the paintings and exhibition space, both of which interact even more urgently together, producing a feeling of cinematic dizziness, that puts into question the construction of the relation between viewer and object.

Morgan Fisher (born 1942 in Washington DC), lives in Santa Monica, USA. In the 1970s and 80's he was among the important protagonists of the structural film movement (“Standard Gauge”, 1984). He first studied history of art and then film. He worked as a film editor and occasionally as a movie extra in Hollywood before beginning to produce experimental films at the end of the sixties. Between 1968 and 1984 he produced twelve films, mostly in 16-mm format, garnering the artist increasing attention. Stemming from the artist’s experience in the film industry, Fishers structural works dissected both the industrial production and marketing elements of this mass medium. The Last film during that period was the masterpiece “Standard Gauge” (1984).

Both through his structuralist films, which have been supplemented in the year 2003 by “( )”, a work that has been prepared for a long time and his most recent paintings, Morgan Fisher has been engaged in an intensive discourse about the construction of perspective and the function of perception. If today Fisher selects the neutral referentiallity of grey paintings it is a similar procedure to his choice of found filmstrips (“Standard Gauge”), cinematic devices (“Cue of roll”) or the modeling studio situations (“Picture and sound Rushes”) in his films. Fisher is not concerned with content or gesture, but rather with demonstrating the way a picture functions and how it steps out from the material space as a picture.

Pressetext

Morgan Fisher: Edge and Corner Paintings