Watch “in the gallery” video series by White Cube Gallery featuring saraH Morris
In the Gallery: Sarah Morris at White Cube Mason’s Yard | White Cube
Find out information about “Snow Leopards and Skyscrapers” exhibition Here
American and British artist Sarah Morris sat down with White Cube Gallery to detail her new exhibition ‘Snow Leopards and Skyscrapers’.
“All great art is a form of trespassing, and I think most artists have that inside of them, the desire to trespass against authority, the desire to not respect the boundaries that are given to us.” – Sarah Morris
“Watch as Sarah Morris introduces her exhibition ‘Snow Leopards and Skyscrapers’ at White Cube Mason’s Yard, which presents a new series of paintings, alongside two film works.” - White Cube Gallery
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Since the start of her practice, Sarah Morris has examined the infrastructures, networks and formations that condition the contemporary landscape, developing serial, diagrammatic matrices that distil and index the systems of power in which we are implicated. In ‘Snow Leopards and Skyscrapers’, the artist’s new series of paintings takes the corporate entities of multinational conglomerates as its point of departure: pharmaceutical corporations, data analytics firms and transnational financial institutions – simultaneously abstracting and representing the elusive powers that preside over, project and regulate the present moment. Alongside the paintings, two film works, Midtown (1998) and Chris Rock (2025), frame Morris’s earliest and most recent engagements with the medium, articulating her preoccupations with the architectures, subjectivities and atmospheres that these systems manifest.
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Conceived and filmed in 1998, at the outset of what now spans 30 years of collaboration between the gallery and Morris, the artist’s debut film Midtown, first shown at Museum Ludwig in Cologne, unfolds as an immersive and fragmentary depiction of Midtown Manhattan. Shot over the course of a single day, the film maps the coordinates surrounding the artist’s first studio on 42nd Street – a corridor that sits wedged between the vertiginous ranks of Midtown’s corporate towers, the lingering marquees of its infamous pre-digital pornography hub, and the relentless, hyper-illuminated address of Times Square. Morris’s films are all set to a unique score by Liam Gillick, composed independently of the image with modular units and later placed alongside the footage. Driven by an insistent tempo, Midtown lingers on surfaces, lights and anonymous passers-by, coalescing into something of a visual manifesto for the artist.
Drawing on the same index that informed Morris’s early series of ‘Midtown’ paintings (1998–2001), the film cuts between light-flooded billboards, the imposing facades of JPMorgan Chase, Revlon, Viacom, the Seagram Building and Lever House, and the steady stream of people on the street – ‘characters’ who, under the camera’s gaze, become momentarily legible as they pass through the frame. Described by the artist in 1999 as a ‘condensed manifesto’ of both her work to date and future productions, the film consolidates many of Morris’s enduring concerns, foregrounding her unique methodology of non-linear assemblage: of situations and places as they exist in time. As Morris remarked, ‘I compile a fragmented view of the urban world. Not the aesthetic of high modernism, but the fragmentary experience that results’.1
Ironically invoking the exhibition’s title, which makes reference to Peter Matthiessen’s famous 1978 travel account of his journey to Nepal’s remote Dolpo region in pursuit of the elusive snow leopard, Morris instead positions the viewer in the urban jungle. Her paintings claim no singular orientation or straightforward fidelity to the subjects their titles identify: Black Rock (2025), The Four Seasons (2026), Johnson & Johnson (2025), Palantir (2026), JP Morgan (2025). In their precise geometric configurations and hyper-saturated palettes, they extend the Capitalist Realism associated with Gerhard Richter, as well as the work of Andy Warhol and Donald Judd, artists with whom Morris has long felt an aesthetic and conceptual affinity. Much as Warhol interrogated the commodity form through repetition and serial display, in Morris’s practice each series generates the next to form a self-reflexive network that echoes the self-perpetuating visual economies of corporate branding, institutional architecture and commercial display.
Throughout her paintings, Morris has remained committed to readymade gloss paint as her primary medium: a choice that serves to underscore the objective gesture of the commercial form. The finished surfaces are accordingly sleek, uniform and seemingly machinic in their appearance, their meticulous sequencing of dots, dashes, shards and parallelograms reinforcing an impression of mechanical reproduction, commercial manufacture and language itself. This apparent immediacy nevertheless belies the truth of the labour embedded within each work, which are in fact the outcome of the artist’s slow, exacting and rigorous production.
In this respect, Morris’s paintings recall, too, Francis Picabia and his wry mobilisation of the machine as a form of portraiture. Where, in Picabia’s work, mechanical diagrams served as unlikely proxies for human character, Morris adopts a comparable strategy. Her paintings are not portraits of institutions as such, but of the networks and ideologies they represent. ‘The building has always been the pretext’, Morris states. ‘It’s actually the flow of capital and data; that’s the image I’m after. What I want to create is an after-image, an after-taste of this thing that is elusive, that is hard to know where the boundaries start and stop.’2 Playing a form of monopoly with her paintings, Morris introduces a subtle inversion of power, contending with and ‘avatarising’ structures long coded as male. It is within this framework that the artist situates her practice alongside a broader lineage of institutional critique associated with artists such as Hans Haacke.
Morris’s most recent film, Chris Rock (2025), offers a personal, behind-the-scenes portrait of the American stand-up comedian, actor, writer and producer, moving between Baltimore’s Hippodrome Theatre and his loft in Downtown New York. An exchange between the artist and Rock, the work stands within a long line of filmic portraits in which the artist has turned her attention to individuals within their cities and the prospective nature of their work, including Robert Towne, Alexander Kluge and Dr Georg Sieber.
In Chris Rock, the comedian reflects on his early career and the various influences that inform his voice – from the American rapper Ice Cube to the televangelist Joel Osteen – weaving these reflections alongside a series of anecdotes and glimpses of the city. Throughout, the film moves between the rehearsed and the improvised: phone calls from fellow comedians and celebrities interrupt conversations; moments of candour sit alongside gestures of self-conscious display. One particular anecdote concerns his grandfather, a preacher who would rehearse his weekly sermons while driving his cab, prompting Rock to liken the sermon to stand-up. The story resurfaces later in the film, repeated with the same impromptu delivery. ‘The element of the performative is present throughout all of my films. It’s there in the Olympics […] You could say when you see Clinton whistling on the South Lawn of the White House. That’s performative for the press’,3 Morris discerns, drawing a parallel with earlier projects including Beijing (2008), Capital (2000) and Los Angeles (2004).
The performative nature of the works in this exhibition, and of Morris’s oeuvre more broadly, constitutes an examination of significations and spectacle, and of how individuals and environments alike mediate, rehearse and circulate their own image. Through these surfaces, the viewer is confronted with the vast organisational systems regulating the spaces we inhabit – the corporations, institutions and networks that, though perceived as distant or abstract, govern the terms of our existence. ‘It all comes down to production’, Morris has remarked. ‘The production of space, the production of brands, the production of art. The production of dreams and desire, are paradoxically intangible at the end of the day.’4
Sarah Morris was born in 1967 in the UK and lives and works in New York. She has exhibited extensively and internationally, including solo exhibitions at Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2026); Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany (2024); Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (2024); Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong (2024); M+ Museum, Hong Kong (2024); Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany (2023); Espace Louis Vuitton, Munich, Germany (2023); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg, Germany (2023); Jesus College, Cambridge, UK (2019); Ullens Center for Contemporary Art, Beijing (2018); Espoo Museum of Modern Art, Finland (2017); M Museum, Leuven, Belgium (2015); Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany (2013); Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio (2012); Fondation Beyeler, Basel, Switzerland (2008); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands (2006); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2001); and Modern Art Oxford, UK (1999). Group exhibitions include ArtCenter College of Design, California (2024); Frac Sud – Cité de l’art contemporain, Marseille, France (2024); Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania (2023); Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin (2023); Kunsthaus Graz, Austria (2022); Whitechapel Gallery, London (2021); 1st Diriyah Contemporary Art Biennale, Saudia Arabia (2021); Albertina Modern, Vienna (2020); FRONT Cleveland Triennial for Contemporary Art (2018); Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2017); Tate Triennial, Tate Britain, London (2003); 25th Bienal de São Paulo (2002); and 4th Site Santa Fe Biennial, New Mexico (2001), among many others.
