SAO PAULO.- Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel presents Lady Snowblood, a new solo exhibition by Sarah Morris, opening November 12 at FDAG Barra Funda. Morris has created a new series of paintings developed in relation to Brazil, the exhibition continues her investigation into the systems, structures, and visual languages through which power organizes contemporary life.
The new paintings take as their points of departure corporate entities of both Brazilian and multinational conglomerates such as Palantir, Telefônica, Banco Safra, Ambev, Unilever, Klabin, and Vale. A new form of landscape confronts us. Drawing from the bureaucratic and organizational systems associated with these corporations, Morris creates her own unique language visualizing the networks that span telecommunications, finance, consumer goods, paper production, and mining to name a few. Architecture disappears and corporate identity becomes the interface for examining the real and "phantom" flow of capital, data, commodities, and information as well as people.
One painting in the exhibition, "Mirthes Bernardes", hinges on the artist, architect and civil worker responsible for the design of the pavement of the state of São Paulo that became a defining element of the city's identity in 1966. Embedded into public space rather than corporate structures, Bernardes's plan is a radical gesture in Morris's mind and shows how art and city planning potentially could unite.
Rendered in household gloss paint, Morris's paintings combine the immaculate surfaces of commercial production with a precise process of construction. Grids, lines, curves, and fields of color evoke diagrams, architectural plans, logos, and information systems coalesce, defying any single image. Detached and fragmented from their original function, these structures are recoded through Morris's paintings. Morris distils the contradictions of the corporate landscape we inhabit and the systems of power that potentially preside over us – Morris explores the degrees to which we are complicit in them or have agency.
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.
Sarah Morris (b. Sevenoaks, United Kingdom, 1967)
Lives and works in New York, USA
Among her recent solo exhibitions are Transactional Authority, Nakanoshima Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan (2026); All Systems Fail, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Germany; Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern, Switzerland (2024); Who is Who, Tai Kwun Contemporary, Hong Kong; ETC, M+, Hong Kong (2024); Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany (2023); Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Germany (2023); As Slow As Possibles, Escape Louis Vuitton, Munich, Germany (2023); Today we find ourselves at an impasse, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel | Carpintaria, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (2019) and Finite and Infinite Games, LUMA Foundation, Zurich, Switzerland (2018). She has also taken part in the group shows Untitled (Pictures from Paradise), MARCO – Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Monterrey, Monterrey, México (2025); Cinco Ensaios sobre o MASP – Geometrias, MASP – Museu de Arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand, São Paulo, Brazil (2025); Endeavours and Masterpieces, Frac Sud – Cité de l’art contemporain, Marseille, France (2024) and The Echo of Picasso, Museo Picasso, Málaga, Spain (2023).
Sarah Morris has works in important public collections, including Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA; Tate Modern, London, UK; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt, Germany; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, USA; Victoria and Albert Museum, London, UK; Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France; Museo Jumex, Mexico City, Mexico; Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, France; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich, Germany; National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia; Schaulager, Basel, Switzerland; and Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, USA.
