LOS ANGELES, CA.- Regen Projects is presenting #34, Los Angeles-based artist Rebecca Morris’s first solo exhibition with the gallery and the thirty-fourth of her career. Over the past thirty years Morris has established a sophisticated visual lexicon to expand the limits and possibilities of non-objective abstraction in painting. As Hamza Walker has written, “Rebecca Morris’s commitment to abstraction lies somewhere between the poles of fierce and rabid, a prerequisite for coping with a pluralism arising not only from across disciplines but from within the discipline of painting itself.”

Grounded in the conviction that the constituent elements of a painting should disrupt as much as they harmonize, Morris’s work generates an internal language that responds to its own codes of meaning. The artist establishes decision-making systems and visual motifs, revisiting and adjusting them as she works. In some cases, she begins her paintings with the canvases on the floor and applies oil paint heavily diluted by solvent, imbuing it with the delicate viscosity of watercolor. She then shifts, tilts, or shakes the canvas, yielding results that are volatile in opacity, surprising in texture, and varied in saturation and contrast. The diluted oil paint forms the ground for the continuation of Morris’s process, in which she paints wet into wet, determining the relationships between each section as she works laterally across the canvas. Adding and never subtracting, Morris records points of tension, disruption, or tenuous harmony in each painting with her choices of color, texture, and pattern building. Even the most geometrically precise lines are drawn by hand, emphasizing the work’s intrinsic risk and spontaneity.

Morris applies this process of questioning, positioning, undoing, and repositioning to cultural and art historical conventions as much as to the physical construction of the paintings. Her systematic methods illogically interrupt grid structures, initiate confrontations between hues and forms, and produce ambiguity between image and frame, thus achieving a fine balance between harmony and disruption. In one painting, she mixes gold and silver metallic tones (a perceived faux pas) to rupture traditional understandings of good taste and visual hierarchies. Other paintings feature bold rectangular or ovoid margins composed of iridescent swaths or metallic fields evocative of repoussé. These elements function as both framing devices and pictorial content, alluding to Morris’s interest in marginalia as a site of critical meaning, no less significant than the central text.

Morris underscores the qualities of improvisation and ambiguity by leaving each work untitled, with a numeric system as its identifier. The system behind this gesture is indexical in ways that are both precise and mysterious, whereby viewers are able to identify when the painting was concluded in relation to other paintings created in the same year, but not when it was started. By complicating the timeline, sequence, and relationship within her own production, Morris’s titles embody the conceptual framework of the exhibition. The system is established, but open to interpretation. The paintings are knowable, but only to a degree. Inevitably, any established understanding will disrupt itself, and begin again.

Rebecca Morris (b.1969 Honolulu, Hawaii) lives and works in Los Angeles. The survey Rebecca Morris: 2001–2022, curated by Jamillah James, opened at the ICA Los Angeles in 2022 and traveled to the MCA Chicago in 2023, accompanied by a comprehensive monograph. Morris has been the subject of significant solo institutional exhibitions at the Blaffer Art Museum, Houston (2019); Bonnefanten Museum, The Netherlands (2014); LAXART, Los Angeles (2014); and The Renaissance Society, Chicago (2005). Her work has been included in notable group shows at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus (2018); Made in L.A. at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2016), and the Whitney Biennial, New York (2014). In 2015, Morris presented a special project at the artist-run 356 Mission in Los Angeles.

Morris’s work is included in numerous public and private collections, among them the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Hirschhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; MoCA, Los Angeles; MCA Chicago; MCA San Diego; DePaul Art Museum, Chicago; Bonnefanten Museum, The Netherlands; Speed Art Museum, Kentucky; Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Hall Art Foundation, Vermont and Germany; and Berezdivin Collection, Puerto Rico. Morris has received awards and fellowships from the Joan Mitchell Foundation, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation, California Community Foundation Fellowship for Visual Art, and Art Matters Inc., among others.