PALFREY

Paul Morrison

Vale/Veil

19 January – 5 February 2022

OPENING Wednesday 19 January 2022, 6 – 8pm

PALFREY is delighted to present Vale/Veil, an exhibition of selected prints by Paul Morrison. 

Over more than twenty-five years, Morrison’s characteristically honed graphic eye has elaborated pictorial visions that oscillate between the terms of the dualities that they invoke, including: original and reproduction, nature and culture, the caricature and the photographic, elegance and awkwardness, comfort and menace, innocence and experience, structure and free play. 

Many of the works here continue Morrison’s long sustained interest in landscape, not as any direct appeal to nature, but as a playful appraisal of the compositional devices of framing, mirroring, distancing and detailing, as they structure both our experience of pictures and of landscape itself. Landscape in these images offers multiple challenges to botanical, psychic and perceptual understandings. (Re)cognition is a central topic for Morrison. It simultaneously refers to the recognition of individual objects, the styles in which they are depicted, and the spaces and relationships between them – or what the mind maps off from the informational cues given to it. The mismatches between these levels of visual, mental and emotional encounter are what Morrison’s images conjure up to charm, arrest and discomfort the viewer.


Paul Morrison was born in Liverpool in 1966 and studied art at Sheffield City Polytechnic (BA 1988) and Goldsmiths College (MA 1998). He has exhibited widely in the UK and internationally since the mid-1990s, with solo exhibitions and projects including, Inverleith House, Royal Botanic Garden, Edinburgh, UK; Carpenter Center for the Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, USA; UCLA Hammer Museum of Art, Los Angeles, USA; Wallworks Aspen Art Museum, Aspen, USA; Artspace, Auckland, New Zealand; Chloroplast, Southampton City Art Gallery, Hampshire, UK; Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nürnberg, Germany; Mesophylle, Magasin, Grenoble, France; Haematoxylon, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland; Saxifraga, Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy; The Contemporary Museum, Honolulu, USA; Bloomberg Space, London, UK; Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, USA; Las Vegas Art Museum, Las Vegas, USA; Manchester Art Gallery, Manchester, UK; The Horticultural Society of New York Gallery, New York, USA; Florigen, Fondazione Volume, Rome, Italy; Auctorum, Millennium Gallery, Sheffield, UK; Open Eye Gallery, Liverpool, UK; Stadtgalerie, Saarbrücken, Germany; Equisetum, Kangkangee Arts Village, Busan, South Korea; Horsetail, Site, Sheffield and Lucid Garden, The Norton Museum, West Palm Beach USA. 

His work can be found in many public art collections, including Victoria and Albert Museum, South London Gallery and British Council Collection in London, Museum of Modern Art in New York, High Museum of Art in Atlanta, Museum of Contemporary Art in Denver, Museum of Art in Rhode Island, The Norton Museum in West Palm Beach, Städel Museum in Frankfurt, and Elgiz Museum in Istanbul. He lives and works in Sheffield.