White Cube is pleased to present an exhibition of new paintings and a film by Sarah Morris. Titled after Carlos Diegues’ ground-breaking film from the 1970s that encapsulated a key moment in the modernisation of contemporary Brazil, the work in this exhibition focuses on the country on the eve of another era of dramatic change.

Morris describes her paintings and filmmaking — parallel activities within her practice — as a way of investigating, tracing and playing with ‘urban, social and bureaucratic typologies’. In Rio (2012), Morris’ eleventh film, she depicts the multifarious and complex layers of this most contradictory of cities, from its highly orchestrated and eroticised surface image, to the infinite realities of its vast urban sprawl, industrial production and the minutiae of its day-to-day living. Johanna Burton has described Morris’ films as being characterised by a ‘pulsing, nervous, chromatic attention’ and in this film, her camera wanders flaneur-like through Rio’s Ipanema beach, hospitals, iconic modernist architecture, football stadiums, factories and favelas. Filming in numerous locations including the office of architect Oscar Niemeyer just before his death, the headquarters’ of the Mayor of Rio, Eduardo Paes, the infamous Carnival and its ‘Winner’s Parade’, the legendary ‘City of God’ neighbourhood, as well as the inside of the Brahma beer factory, Rio focuses on the city’s architecture and, in particular, on the way that it engineers social interaction and plays a key role in Brazil’s outward-facing identity. With images that alternate between the micro and macro, day and night, Morris’ film creates a hallucinatory space that explores the psychology of this city at a particular moment in its history and traces how this is embedded in behaviour, signs, surfaces and Rio’s complex political history.

In the new series of ‘Rio’ paintings, Morris both expands and reduces her abstract compositions, or what the artist refers to as ‘diagrams’, utilising dynamic new forms and colours that act like collective after-images or codes. Drawing inspiration from a wide range of sources — the work of Roberto Burle Marx, Lina Bo Bardi, Oscar Niemeyer, lunar cycles, fruit and even Bossa Nova album covers — her canvases are made up of vivid compositions whose curves, vectors and interlocking spheres reference a way of perception as well as the sharp contrasts of Rio’s many social forms. Morris’ palette for these paintings draws influence from these sources as well as from the Carnival at Sambódromo, which is also the work of the legendary Niemeyer, Rio’s numerous fruit juice bars, its beach chairs and umbrellas and the industrial design of mainstream Brazilian products such as Brahma beer. Morris’ paintings streamline the particular psychology of Rio’s urban environment through splintered and repeat compositions that are in perpetual play.

A fully illustrated catalogue with essays by Roger Avary and Bettina Funcke will accompany the exhibition.

Sarah Morris was born in 1967 in the UK and grew up in Providence, Rhode Island, USA. She lives and works in New York and London. Solo exhibitions include ‘Points on a Line’, The Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio (2012); MAMbo, Bologna (2009); MMK, Frankfurt (2009); Lenbachaus, Munich (2008); Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2008); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2006); Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2005); Palais de Tokyo, Paris (2005); Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen (2004); Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover (2005) and National galerie im Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2001). Group exhibitions include 4th Site Santa Fe Biennial (2001); 25th Bienal de São Paolo (2002) and ‘Days Like These’, Tate Triennial, London (2003).

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