Shanghai
Fosun Foundation Shanghai is delighted to announce “Hope from a Thin Line,” the first large-scale institutional survey in China by artist Annie Morris. The exhibition will feature sculptures, tapestries, and paintings dating back to 2012, offering an extensive overview of Morris’s vivid, lyrical work. The exhibition will also include a site-specific, gallery-spanning mural on which drawings and tapestries are installed, creating a dynamic formal dialogue that evokes notions of ephemerality and the metaphorical afterlife. Using different media, Morris interweaves explorations of personal experience with those of line, surface, and volume. This will be the Fosun Foundation’s third solo exhibition of a woman artist, following exhibitions of Yayoi Kusama and Cindy Sherman, and Morris’s first large-scale research solo exhibition in Asia, marking a continuation of Fosun Foundation’s spotlight on women's art, and presenting a comprehensive view of the artist’s diverse practice stemming from her unique life experience.
“Stack 9, Ultramarine Blue,” 2024
Height533 cm, width 110cm
©Annie Morris Studio
A remarkable installation from Morris’s “Stacks” series (2018–2024) will be assembled, including the tallest pigment sculpture the artist has completed to date, at a monumental 5.3 meters tall. In these totemic compositions, irregularly shaped spheres of myriad colors—lavender, oxblood red, ocher, viridian—appear to balance atop each other, suspended in a moment before collapse. For Morris, these wondrous, colorful structures allude to the “shapes of loss.” In 2012, while the artist was grieving a stillbirth, she began collaging ovular shapes that referenced both eggs and her pregnant belly. She began to carve the forms from foam and plaster and arrange them on a steel armature, literally holding them aloft. In our accustomed experience, feelings of happiness are inextricably linked to feelings of rising, but the result of stacking is imminent danger of collapse. This individual trauma touches on humanity’s shared fragility, while the sense of instability and fragmentation symbolizes our looming fate. Each act of stacking is an eternal memorial to life that has passed.
“Stack 3, Ultramarine Blue Light,” 2024
Height 220cm, width 130cm
©Annie Morris Studio
For Morris, repetition is a central compositional and processual strategy. Often, she repeats a form or idea until it transforms into something concentrated and abstract. Across the tapestries and paintings on view at Fosun Foundation is the recurring motif of the Flower Woman. A woman with the head of a flower, the figure represents a hybrid portrait of the artist. Her fragile fleeting petals recall the transience of beauty. Eschewing facial expression, the Flower Woman conveys emotion through Morris’s kinetic, impulsive linework. Morris’s tapestries begin with automatic drawings that she translates onto canvas with thread. Employing various signature stitching techniques, she creates the surprising effect of painted, pastel, and charcoal marks in thread. In this way, she uses a labor-intensive, almost obsessive technical process to generate expressive, spontaneous compositions that she refers to as thread paintings.
“Flowerhead Pigment, Ultramarine Blue,” 2018
184cm x 56cm x 44cm
©Annie Morris Studio
Her signature Flower Woman also appears in two human-scaled steel figures from 2018 and 2023, alongside a third, from 2023, that features a reptilian head Each of these fantastical figures, in ultramarine blue, turquoise, and cadmium red, is articulated in the same impassioned line Morris achieves in her drawings. Such illusions commingle with primordial and astral forms in the site-specific mural Morris has created for Fosun Foundation, installed on the museum’s third floor. Here, in scenes that are at once restless and contemplative, Morris offers an immersive view into her subconscious.
“Untitled (Figure, Cadmium Red),” 2023
Framed: 90.5cm x 69.5cm
©Annie Morris Studio
“This is the beginning of everything. Let us create these shapes. Let the line come alive in these towering ‘stacks’.”
“Red Road,” 2022
Framed: 174cm x 386.5cm
©Annie Morris Studio
Endless experimentation in color and form is a way for the artist to control her emotions and face setbacks. Though Morris originally described her repeated sculpting of ovular images as driven by an impulse of "despair,” the “Stacks” series has undergone a shift in its meaning over the years since its first appearance—these are no longer means for therapy or tools for cathartic release, but instead an active exploration of infinite creative possibility. What appear to be solid, colored sculptures are actually carved from light foam, conveying unassailable energy. The transformation of things obtained from life—or things which cannot be obtained, or can never be regained—into soul-stirring hope, the rebellion and vitality that artistic creation brings to life, are the driving force and central focus of the work of Fosun Foundation: the tireless exploration of how to create entirely new experiences in the face of inescapable destiny and the trivialities of everyday life, and to give birth to things brimming with life.
“Figures, Manganese Purple,” 2023
Framed: 72.7cm x 108.7cm
©Annie Morris Studio
About Annie Morris
Annie Morris
©Annie Morris. Photo: Idris Khan
Annie Morris was born in 1978 in London, where she lives and works today. She studied under Giuseppe Penone at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts, Paris (1997–2001) before completing her education at the Slade School of Fine Art in London in 2003. 2021 marked the artist’s first museum exhibition, with a solo presentation of sculptures and tapestries at Yorkshire Sculpture Park’s Weston Gallery. In 2023, she was commissioned by the Hepworth Wakefield to create a permanent installation for the West Yorkshire History Centre. Her two-person exhibition with Idris Khan travelled from Newlands House Gallery, Petworth, to Pitzhanger Manor & Gallery, London, in 2024. Morris’s work resides in such collections as the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris; the AmorePacific Museum of Art, Seoul; and the Hôtel de Crillon, Paris. In 2021, Claridge’s Hotel, London, unveiled a site-specific stained-glass commission by the artist as part of the launch of the Painter’s Room.
Shanghai Fosun Foundation
Located in the Bund Finance Center, Fosun Foundation Shanghai is a non-profit organization founded by the Fosun Group and the Fosun Foundation. The center is designed by British design firm Foster + Partners and creative director Heatherwick Studio. The building features three layers of moving veils as a facade.
Fosun Foundation's core mission is to promote contemporary art, connect China with international cultural systems, and foster public engagement with, understanding of, and participation in global contemporary art. Its roof houses the large-scale spatial installation Counter Sky Garden by renowned Japanese artist Tatsuo Miyajima, with the participation of three hundred Shanghai residents. The artwork is a part of the Foundation’s permanent collection. Fosun Foundation also continues to focus on and support local Chinese artists, providing a broader platform for the exhibition of outstanding works of Chinese contemporary art.
