SAN DIEGO, CA.- The Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego will present an exhibition from San Diego artist Richard Allen Morris—on display May 5 through August 28, 2005—at its Downtown location. Morris is a “painter’s painter,” who creates works that passionately explore the potential of painting as an artistic practice. His good friend John Baldessari has explained, “Richard taught me what it takes to be an artist. He was and still is one of my role models. He can do things with paint that takes my breath away and I am left in awe.” In May, the Museum will celebrate Morris’s remarkable achievements with the first comprehensive retrospective of his work with Richard Allen Morris: Retrospective 1958-2005, an exhibition that includes 150 paintings made over the course of a fifty-year career.

Morris was born in 1933 in Chula Vista, California and grew up in Torrington, Wyoming. After traveling around the world in the navy, he has made San Diego his home since 1956. Despite the fact that Morris had no formal training in the arts, except for his two years of high school art classes, he left the military to embark upon the contemplative life of a painter. “He intuitively comprehends the parameters of the tradition and the unique essence of the materials involved,” his colleague James Hayward has said. “And he is not afraid to question it all.”

Beginning with early works in which Morris honed his skill by borrowing motifs from contemporary and old masters, the retrospective will include examples of his work from the many different styles he has adopted throughout his career. From portrait faces reminiscent of cartoon caricatures to his own version of constructivist painting made with colored adhesive strips, Morris has experimented with almost every aspect of gestural and hard-edge painting. Abstraction has been predominated in the work be it in painting or an assemblage technique in which he cut his rejected paintings into strips and piled them onto a new support. Steeped in the spirit of experimentation and always questioning academic rules, Morris’s oeuvre is an iconoclastic tour de force that has quietly inspired several generations of Southern California artists. Richard Allen Morris: Retrospective 1958-2005 is organized by Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany. The San Diego presentation of Richard Allen Morris: Retrospective 1958-2005 is made possible thanks to the generous participation of the patrons at the MCASD Art Auction 2004. Special thanks to John Baldessari and David Reed for their contributions. Additional support has been provided by the Mandell Weiss Charitable Trust, Clark Tess Properties, and Dr. Charles G. and Monica Cochrane.