Paul Morrison
UCLA Hammer Museum, Los Angeles
October 4, 2000 - January 7, 2001
British artist Paul Morrison will create a mural for the UCLA Hammer Museum's lobby wall. Using botanical guides, children's storybooks, and cartoons as his inspiration and source material, Paul Morrison creates large-scale monochrome landscapes that have been described as "Disney without the characters." Not unlike Alice's psychedelic-tinged Wonderland, many of Morrison's hypnotic fantasy environments seem to pivot between innocence and malevolence in the blink of an eye. Paul Morrison alters our sense of scale, perspective, and positive-negative space to create visually striking compositions. Spiky brush and trees often obscure the view beyond the immediate foreground. Dandelion plants and other flora are enlarged to many times their normal size. Referencing Pop art and Op art as well as neo-romantic bookplate illustrations and the graphic art of Aubrey Beardsley, Morrison's Pop-naturalist landscapes flirt with abstraction in jarring and unexpectedly seductive ways.
UCLA HAMMER MUSEUM
10899 Wilshire Boulevard, Westwood Village, Los Angeles, CA 90024
