PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY IN MONTREAL IS PLEASED TO PRESENT “TEN PAINTINGS SMALL” AN INSTALLATION OF NEW WORKS BY QUÉBEC ARTIST ANDREW MORROW
ANDREW MORROW
TEN PAINTINGS SMALL
MONTREAL
FEBRUARY 18 TO MARCH 25, 2017
ARTIST RECEPTION:
SATURDAY, FEBRUARY 18
2 P.M. TO 5 P.M.
PATRICK MIKHAIL GALLERY in Montréal is pleased to present an installation of new works by Québec artist ANDREW MORROW. The exhibition, entitled TEN PAINTINGS SMALL, incorporates new paintings on paper and furthers Morrow’s exploration of a fragmented and expanded language of history painting after Modernism.
Referencing a wide range of history painting and early photography, Morrow’s current paintings present a deconstruction of pictorial strategies from realist painting and narrative histories. Painted as a counterpoint to an ongoing large-scale public art project, TEN PAINTINGS SMALL features ten small oil paintings on paper. In contrast to the incumbencies and constraints associated with public art, these paintings are straightforward and inward-looking, concerned primarily with painterly issues, almost willfully blind to the sociopolitical complexities underlying their source material.
Developed from fragments of history painting and 19th century photography, these new works maintain a conscious detachment from originating contexts and meanings, subsuming source materials to formalist painting concerns, such as scale, composition, and space. Additionally, through the reduction of source material to familiar archetypes from history and genre painting—the nude, the worker, the land, the soldier, the artist—figures are apprehended from photographic history and re-assigned to the service of painting. In this exhibition, Morrow re-states the belief that in all things painting, painting comes first.
Morrow holds a BFA from Queen’s University and an MFA from the University of Ottawa. He was a finalist in the 2004 RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and the 2007 Toronto Arts Council Emerging Artist Award. He is the recipient of the 2011 RBC Emerging Artist Award. Morrow is on the Board of Directors of the Ottawa Arts Council, and is an Adjunct Professor in the Visual Arts Department at the University of Ottawa. The artist lives and works in Chelsea, Québec.