Super-sized egos, government bureaucracies, and major corporations have a way of stifling creativity, but not for the artist Sarah Morris . In her colorful, grid-based paintings and episodic films of urban architecture, the longtime New Yorker has probed powerful systems and structures of all kinds.
For her 2008 film Beijing , she sought—and obtained—permission to film at that year's Summer Olympics from the International Olympic Committee and the Chinese government. Earlier, working with the Public Art Fund in 2006, she covered the lobby and courtyard of New York's landmarked Lever House skyscraper with her sprawling mural Robert Towne (named for the Hollywood screenwriter). Her latest film Strange Magic, commissioned by LVMH for the opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, is similarly ambitious and perhaps even rangier in its scope; it explores the construction of the controversial Frank Gehry -designed museum in the Bois de Boulogne, gives us a portrait of Gehry himself, and goes deep into the mysterious workings of the luxury conglomerate.
The film can be seen this week in the “Unlimited” section of Art Basel ; Morris's paintings will be shown elsewhere in the fair, along with a short film about her by her friend Anna Gaskell . (Titled Echo Morris , it centers on Morris's 2011 legal skirmish with a group of origami artists who sued her for using their designs in her paintings—an episode that resulted in a settlement and, in a way the plaintiffs probably never intended, dovetailed with larger themes of ownership and control in Morris's art).
When Artspace visited Morris's immaculate Long Island City studio earlier this month, the artist—looking stylishly severe in a uniform-like black ensemble with a red belt that matched her lipstick—was getting ready for Basel while also working on paintings, researching her next film, and preparing for a solo exhibition that opens in October at the Museum Leuven in Belgium. She spoke to Karen Rosenberg about going behind the scenes of LVMH, why it takes a conspiracy to build a museum, and what she's learned from her former boss Jeff Koons .
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