Mali Morris
Mali Morris is a painter who has been showing nationally and internationally since her first major exhibitions at the Serpentine Summer Show 3, London, 1977 and the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, 1979. She has held over 40 solo shows, and group shows include the Barbican, Hayward Gallery, Serpentine Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Walker Art Gallery Liverpool, Whitworth Gallery Manchester, Museum of Wales Cardiff, as well as a number overseas. Recent solo shows were at Hatton Gallery Newcastle, 2024-5, Ikon Gallery Birmingham, 2023, Hales New York, 2022, and the Tennant Gallery, Royal Academy, in 2019. Her Banners for Bond Street during the summer 2022 were accompanied by a print retrospective in Keeper’s House, Royal Academy.
She is included in public and private collections worldwide and has received many awards, shortlisted for the David and Yuko Juda Foundation Award in 2022. In 2010 she was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts and shows annually in the RA Summer Exhibitions.
“My preoccupations over 60 years have been fairly constant: I’m fascinated by how the space of painting and the space of the world are separate from one another, although always connected. Among the various epiphanies along the way I’d say the most important was when I realised that colour can structure luminosity, which makes space open up, as it emanates from the surface of the work and back into the world.
Another was when I understood that touch is different from gesture – again in terms of opening up pictorial space. I’m always interested in how the stuff of paint reaches the surface of the painting, and how that reality – material and technical – can be seen to embody feeling.”