Ree Morton: Signs and Gestures

Situated within the context of emerging feminist discourse and shifting understandings of the role of women artists, Morton resisted fixed categorisation. Her practice intersected with Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, and feminist art, while maintaining a position independent of any singular movement. She played with notions of the decorative in ways that deliberately disrupted the austere norms of Minimal and Post-Minimalist aesthetics, irreverently introducing vivid colour, ornamental gestures, and unexpected material flourishes. Over the course of a single decade, she developed a highly distinctive body of work that bridged conceptual rigor with personal experience.

Morton critically engaged with cultural constructions of femininity, including ideals of motherhood, fragility, decoration, and the “girlish”. In 1974, she began working with celastic—a malleable textile more commonly used in theatre—which she shaped into ribbons, banners, and flowers drawn from traditionally feminine visual vocabularies. Through this material, she developed a subversive visual language that both reclaims and destabilises decorative form, challenging hierarchies of medium while foregrounding the politics of female imagery.

The exhibition brings together a focused selection of works from Ree Morton’s brief yet prolific career, foregrounding the development of her practice across painting, drawing, and sculptural forms. It includes early canvases from 1970 that explore form and repetition in dialogue with post-minimalist concerns, alongside an example of large-scale cartographic work on paper, Game Map Drawing I–VI (1972–1973).

 

The presentation then traces Morton’s shift toward sculptural assemblage, where her use of wood and logs signals a decisive move away from conventional approaches to artmaking and toward a more expansive, materially driven practice. It culminates in two works from 1976, Regional Piece and Prince and Princess from the monumental installation Signs of Love, which articulate her turn toward personal narrative, kitsch imagery, and her distinctive use of celastic. 

 

Presented in collaboration with the Estate of Ree Morton, with support of Allan Schwartzman, this will be the first ever solo presentation of Ree Morton in the UK.