Details:
① Artwork:
Romulus and Remus, 1995
The artist was born a conjoined, identical twin, separated four days after birth. As such, he and his sibling explore issues of non-identical repetition, gender variance, and queerness, as with this copy of Sherrie Levine’s 1995 gridded diptych named after Rome’s famous mythological twins.
Drawn to the artist Sherrie Levine due to how she has employed appropriation, copying, or even ‘twinning’ in her work since the early 1980s, Morris began methodically remaking her paintings in 2015, adhering to all her original specifications of scale, material, color, and design.
Without any clear sign of who today lays claim to the historical trappings of the traditional feminine, Matt Morris brings these cultural and psychological artifacts to his paintings. In this space, psychoanalyzing takes place via the cosmetic. A ribbon, for instance, carries with it the history of misogyny and frivolity. His navigation of these formal and physical qualities is a method for kickstarting both autobiographical and collective memory work.
Specs:
Painting is a diptych made of two panels. Panels are made of solid mahogany wood with keyhole hangers at 4 corners on the reverse for flush hanging to wall. Wood is treated for painting on surface and sides are burnished and treated. Acrylic paint is applied methodically, edge-to-edge with adjacent squares, leaving small elements of mahogany visible between squares.
③ Artist:
Matt Morris is an artist, perfumer, and writer who follows Freud’s “reproduction of certain scenes” to engage in processes of recollection and excavation from repressed memory. Artistically, he paints with a melancholy that reflects on the production of liberation ideologies, and his work tracks signifiers with labels like feminine, femme, effeminate, effete, and faggot that pervade the history of art, advertising, fashion, pornography, and other zones of visual culture.
Matt Morris is originally from Southern Louisiana and currently lives in Chicago, IL. He earned his BFA from the Art Academy of Cincinnati in Cincinnati, OH (2007), his MFA in Art Theory + Practice with a certificate in Gender + Sexuality Studies from Northwestern University in Evanston, IL (2013), and his certification in Fairyology from Doreen Virtue, PhD (2017). Morris is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
He has recently presented his art in group and solo shows at Tiger Strikes Asteroid in Brooklyn, NY; Andrew Kreps in New York City, NY; RUSCHMAN in Berlin, Germany; Netwerk Aalst in Aalst, Belgium; Krabbesholm Højskole in Skive, Denmark; and The Suburban in Milwaukee, WI, among others.
As a writer, Morris contributes to Artforum.com, Art Papers, ARTnews, Flash Art, Fragrantica, Sculpture, The Seen, and X-TRA.
The artist was born a conjoined, identical twin, separated four days after birth. As such, he and his sibling explore issues of non-identical repetition, gender variance, and queerness, as with this copy of Sherrie Levine’s 1995 gridded diptych named after Rome’s famous mythological twins.More
- Unframed
- Signed
- The listed dimensions note the overall width of the diptych hung with a 3.5 inch space between the two panels.
