War of Roses (Sound Graph)

SARAH MORRIS (B. 1967)
War of Roses (Sound Graph)
signed, titled and dated '''WAR OF ROSES [SOUND GRAPH]'' S MORRIS 2018' (on the overlap)
household gloss on canvas
60 x 60in. (152.5 x 152.5cm.)
Executed in 2018

White Cube, London.
Acquired from the above by the present owner.

Sarah Morris first started to attract attention in the 1990s with her abstract paintings and non-narrative films, which, she says, investigate ‘urban, social and bureaucratic typologies’. A 2017 profile in Interview magazine described her canvases as ‘controlled detonations, more scientific than spontaneous declarations’, as well as ‘kaleidoscopic grids [that] function like cultural spiderwebs’.

The present work, War of Roses (Sound Graph), from 2018, combines aspects of both her painting and her film work. Using audio recordings of author and fellow filmmaker Alexander Kluge speaking in one of Morris’s previous film projects, Finite and Infinite Games (2017), she mapped his speech patterns onto a canvas. The resulting work is both an accurate record of what was said and a highly distorted representation of language.