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Thursday 6 February

Sarah Morris: The Anatomist of Modern Capitalism

Listen to me carefully, you bunch of snobs! Sarah Morris (born in 1967) is not just an artist making pretty colorful grids to decorate your sanitized living rooms. She is one of the few who understood that geometric abstraction did not die with Mondrian but can still speak to us about our hyper-capitalist, over-industrialized, and paradoxically disconnected world.

Look at her monumental paintings, these mathematical compositions that seem straight out of a non-Euclidean geometry textbook. These works are not there to look pretty in your designer interiors. They are the relentless reflection of our algorithmic society, where every decision is dictated by data matrices. Morris uses industrial alkyd paint, the kind you find in any hardware store. A radical choice echoing Walter Benjamin’s thoughts on the technical reproducibility of art. She transforms this banal material into glossy surfaces that act as distorting mirrors of our urban reality.

Her latest series, “Sound Graph” and “Spiderweb”, are particularly striking. These canvases seem to capture the very essence of what Gilles Deleuze called “societies of control”. The intersecting lines mimic information flows, creating tension nodes that evoke the nerve centers of our surveilled metropolises. The grid is no longer just a formal device inherited from modernism; it becomes a chilling metaphor for our lives, gridlocked by algorithms.

But Morris doesn’t just paint. She also films our cities with surgical precision that would make Dziga Vertov look like an amateur. Her films, like “Rio”, “Beijing”, or “Abu Dhabi”, are not simple tourist documentaries. They are ruthless dissections of what Guy Debord called the “society of the spectacle”. She captures these metropolises in their architectural excess, capitalist hubris, and pathological desire for control.

In “Finite and Infinite Games” (2017), she takes her reflection further, drawing on James P. Carse’s theories. She shows us how contemporary architecture, embodied by Hamburg’s Elbphilharmonie, becomes the stage for a struggle between two worldviews: that of the finite game (winning at all costs) and that of the infinite game (playing to keep playing).

Her work is a slap in the face to proponents of decorative, harmless art. She uses the codes of geometric abstraction not to create decorative works but to dissect the mechanisms of power that govern our societies. Her paintings and films function as X-rays of our era, revealing the invisible structures that constrain us.

Sarah Morris transforms cold data—whether architectural plans, economic statistics, or sound recordings—into visceral aesthetic experiences. She achieves that rare feat: making the invisible visible without falling into didacticism. Her works confront us with the reality of our city-machines, these metropolises promising paradise while locking us into golden grids.

To those who think contemporary art should merely be decorative, Morris presents a radically political practice. She takes the formal weapons of modernism—the grid, pure color, geometry—and turns them against the system that emptied them of revolutionary substance. Her paintings are visual viruses infiltrating the sanitized spaces of late capitalism to expose its contradictions.

The way she combines painting and cinema is particularly compelling. These two seemingly antagonistic mediums feed into each other in a fascinating dialectic. Her films document the brutal reality of our metropolises, while her paintings abstract their underlying structures. This is precisely what Fredric Jameson referred to as the “cognitive mapping” of late capitalism.

Her installation “Ataraxia” (2019) pushes this logic to its extreme. By covering an entire room’s walls with geometric patterns, she creates a mental space evoking both the control rooms of multinational corporations and the padded cells of asylums. Ataraxia, the state of unshakable calm sought by Stoic philosophers, here becomes the symptom of a society anesthetized by its own control mechanisms.

As architecture today has become the weapon of financial capitalism, where skyscrapers are less buildings than three-dimensional graphs of real estate speculation, Morris raises essential questions: who controls space? How does the geometry of power shape our lives? Her works are vision machines that allow us to see what we didn’t want to see.

Make no mistake: behind the formal elegance of her compositions lies a scathing critique of our late modernity. Morris is not a decorator for multinational lobbies; she is an anatomist of contemporary capitalism. She dissects the structures of power with a surgeon’s precision and the restrained fury of an activist.

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