Sarah Morris is an internationally celebrated artist whose vibrant graphic compositions and films capture the energy of urban environments and examine systems of power that influence the global sociopolitical landscape. Morris is fascinated by, and appropriates, the superficial qualities of commercial and corporate culture in contemporary architecture and design. Streamlining a vocabulary of visual motifs that recall the rectilinear geometry of European modernism and American Minimalism, Morris connects these elements to the anonymous styles of American corporate architecture and plays with the cultural values of social power and prestige imbued in these spaces.
Morris originally executed ‘UBS Wall Painting’ in 2001 as an on-site installation in a former UBS building, the Zurich-Oerlikon Dinocenter. In 2019 it was re-created in the lobby of UBS Americas headquarters at 1285 Avenue of the Americas in New York, the same building that is the subject of her painting ‘Midtown-PaineWebber (with Neon)’ (1998), in the UBS Art Collection. This work is from the ‘Midtown’ series of paintings, made in the late 1990s, in which the grided facades of Manhattan skyscrapers are employed as the iconography. For this body of work, Morris selected brightly synthetic colors that echo the artifice of illuminated signage or data displays. In the monumental ‘UBS Wall Painting’ (2001/2019) the artist redefined the work, adjusting the original concept to fit the building designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, revisiting the painting’s color scheme and expanding its structure.
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