Two Worlds Entwined: Annie Morris and Idris Khan
11 February to 04 June 2023
The artist couple’s work side by side for the first time in the U.K. ‘Two Worlds Entwined: Annie Morris and Idris Khan’ explores the artistic practices of Annie and Idris within the historic and intimate setting of Newlands House Gallery.
“At Newlands House they each have an introductory room before, as the exhibition title suggests, the two worlds entwine. Composed of densely overlaid photographs, sheets of music and religious and personal texts, Khan’s carefully considered prints and sculptures hum with time and memory. Morris’s drawings and tapestries hover between figuration and abstraction and are instinctive and free.”
– Chloe Ashby, The Independent
Artist Annie Morris’s multi-disciplinary practice draws on both personal experience and the history of art to create works of art noted for their energetic, electric nature. Idris Khan, drawing inspiration from the history of art and music as well as key philosophical and theological texts, investigates memory, creativity, and the layering of experience.
An artist couple, Annie and Idris were married in Dordogne in 2009. The exhibition will present, for the first time in the UK, the practice of this highly successful couple side by side, exploring the relationship present in the works as the artists each looks inwardly and outwardly to find their inspiration and voice as they experience life together and filter it through their unique and distinct practices.
“Two Worlds Entwined begins with Morris and Khan’s works in separate rooms, allowing for an appreciation of the difference in energy between the artists’ individual works, before they are later united. This configuration captures the harmony between their lives, while also revealing points of conflict in their artistic relationship. But even when placed together, one artist does not overshadow the other; these two bodies of work, just like the two artists who created them, coexist in harmony.”
– Donna Salek, The World of Interiors
The show will transform Newlands House into the creative realm of Annie and Idris, presenting both new works and historic pieces. Playful yet contemplative, audiences will be invited to fall into the colours, words, thoughts, and emotions stirred by the artworks and experience the atmosphere the couple conjures in their work. Bold and dynamic, the contrast of the contemporary with the historic rooms of the gallery will provide a new context for the art, one which mimics the familiar space of the home.
About Annie Morris
Annie Morris is a London-based artist born in 1978. Morris’s multi-disciplinary practice draws on both personal experience and the history of art. Encompassing sculpture, tapestry, painting and drawing, her intuitive use of line weaves between abstraction and representation.
Morris’s most recognisable body of work is her ‘Stack’ series, begun in 2014 and inspired by the artist’s grief following a stillbirth. The sculptures, which are comprised of irregular spheres precariously arranged into tall columns, evoke the swell of pregnancy. Sculpted in plaster or cast in bronze, the forms are painted with hand-sourced, raw pigments in vivid hues, such as Ultramarine, Viridian and Ochre, which give Morris’s lumpen orbs a rich, vibrant hue. Morris uses the same deep pigments in her drawing and tapestry practice, which combines personal ciphers with abstract mark-making and grid-like structures.
Morris’s works feature in public and private collections, including Louis Vuitton Foundation, Paris, France and Shanghai, China; University of Colorado Art Museum, Boulder, CO, USA; Modern Forms, London, UK; Cranford Collection, London, UK; Kistefos Museet, Norway; Perez Collection, Miami, FL, USA; The Gersh Collection, Los Angeles, CA, USA; Missoni Family Collection, Italy; Victoria and Warren Miro, London, UK; Soho House Collection, London, UK; Hotel Crillon Collection, Paris, Francel and De Grisogono Collection, New York, NY, USA, among others.
Recent solo exhibitions include Annie Morris, Château La Coste, Provence, France, 2022; Annie Morris: Where a Happy Thing Falls, Weston Gallery, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK, 2021; Annie Morris, Timothy Taylor, London, UK, 2020; Annie Morris: Diaries (online), Timothy Taylor, London, UK, 2019; and Annie Morris: Solo Exhibition, Timothy Taylor, New York, NY, USA, 2019.
About Idris Khan
Drawing inspiration from the history of art and music as well as key philosophical and theological texts, Idris Khan investigates memory, creativity and the layering of experience. Khan’s works – in media including sculpture, painting and photography – rely on a continuous process of creation and erasure, or the adding of new layers while retaining traces of what has gone before. He is well known for his large-scale works in which techniques of layering are used to arrive at what might be considered the essence of an image, and to create something entirely new through repetition and superimposition.
Born in 1978, Idris Khan lives and works in London, United Kingdom. His work is in the permanent collections of many institutions worldwide including, LACMA, Los Angeles, Albright Knox Museum, The British Museum, London; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, Israel; the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia; the Philadelphia Museum of Art; the de Young Museum, San Francisco; and the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France.
Khan has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at international museums including The New Art Gallery Walsall, Walsall, United Kingdom; the Whitworth Gallery, the University of Manchester, United Kingdom; Gothenburg Konsthall, Sweden; the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, Canada; Kunsthaus Murz, Mürzzuschlag, Austria and K20, Dusseldorf, Germany. Idris Khan’s design for Abu Dhabi’s memorial park, Wahat Al Karama was awarded the 2017 American Architecture Prize. He was appointed an OBE for services to Art in the 2017 Queen’s Birthday Honours List.
Installation photography © Elizabeth Zeschin
Exhibition Catalogue:
