Leanne Morrison: Off the Edge_Re-defining Boundaries

Leanne Morrison’s practice positions her firmly within the modernist tradition, but extends past this into a consideration of the painting as a material object in and of itself. Her style is representational—but she is representing what art critic Clement Greenberg described as “the limitations that constitute the medium of painting—the flat surface, the shape of the support, the properties of the pigment” (1).

Morrison places wide bands and blocks of colour alongside and on top of one another to explore the way painted layers and colours respond to one another. The recessive and advancing properties of colour are utilised to establish areas of “optical space” behind or between the coloured sections of each painting. Morrison highlights the fact that her artworks not only investigate colour, line, flatness, and paint but that the painted canvas also operates as a skin that is manipulated around its three-dimensional supports.

She reveals the tension that exists between the painting as an object and the painting as a painted surface. In 2017 Art Critic John Hurrell noted how the startling precision and dramatic shapes of Morrison’s paintings coerced the viewer into wanting to discover what ‘lay beneath’ the thin layers of paint (2).

- Clement Greenberg, “Modernism”, Forum Lectures (Washington, DC: Voice of America), 1960.
- http://eyecontactsite.com/2017/05/materialised-painting-a-reprise, accessed 11/03/19.

Credit: Milford Galleries, Dunedin.