PARD MORRISON | Everywhere You Go Love

“All experiences, whether visual, aural, or tactile, are evaluated and understood using a wide array of both socially learned and evolutionary informational filters.  Real experience is rapidly being replaced by artificial two-dimensional experience. This increasingly jeopardizes our relationship with ourselves and the meaning of our very purpose and existence. The anthropomorphization of technological devices further blurs the distinction between natural existence and post narrative experience.  My interest lies in the exploration of an intersection; the intersection of pictorial illusion, and specific object, and the marriage of both especially as it pertains to human experience and the balance between body and soul.  I hope to create work that upon first encounter primarily reads as artificially fabricated, but upon further investigation, the visual intransigence of its own ‘objectness’ is compromised by specific human mark making. The sculptural works have a familiar materiality and shape, as the scale refences humanness, but they also display attributes that are somewhat unnamable, mysterious, infinite, and vast. This visual language of specific geometric gesture simultaneously establishes compositional form, and at the same time visually contradicts the specific object that it is applied upon. Using color not only as a medium, but as a compositional tool, I hope to visually celebrate the power and beauty of the Spirit that is within us and surrounds us all. It is my ambition to reference the vastness of benevolent energy that constantly envelops us. These works are momentary portraits of systems that are in flux and allude to the power that love, faith, happiness, and hope have on all of us.”

- Pard Morrison

Robischon Gallery is pleased to present its first exhibition for Colorado artist Pard Morrison. The exuberant solo exhibition entitled “Everywhere You Go Love,” features the artist’s signature approach toward Geometric Abstraction infused with uncommon, chromatic linear resonances and an unexpected painterly approach. With his stately, vivid columnar installation, large and small paintings and a selection of painted dimensional wall sculptures, Morrison merges his deep discernment of form and palette with an application of hard-won, individualized marks signifying to the artist, the constancy of the human spirit.

Influenced by the ground-breaking work and linear language of the abstract icon Agnes Martin, in which the character of the human hand is apparent, and whose brand of abstraction leaned toward the monochromatic and minimal, Morrison’s mark, with its hand-brushed industrial pigments, distinctly embraces rare contrasting hues which uniquely shares in Martin’s contemplative stance. Each complex and nuanced Morrison work is comprised of vertically and horizontally unifying elements transecting in a manner that expresses a transportive visual and felt grace. The exquisitely fabricated volumized vertical forms of Everywhere You Go Love are both aesthetically compelling and durably patinated to reside as almost talisman-like towers within their environment. The sculptures possess a relatability of near-human scale and the evidentiary mark of the artist’s hand that Morrison terms a harmonious “human minimalism.”

The vast, impactful grid painting entitled My Life in Pink, with its central pink outlined diamond and neutral, background overlaid with a vibrant lattice in which each uniquely colorful segment of the grid is dependent on the next, reflects, according to the artist, “the benevolence that continually surrounds us.” Morrison further considers, “The grid makes sense to me – [with regards to] our devotion to technology – as a simultaneously confining and an ever-expanding structure. The importance of this work, for me, is: where does the human vernacular fit into technology? Is it shaping us, or are we shaping it? Are we stuck in it? Do we have any room to explore or celebrate? Where are we?”

Within his abstract language embracing both sculpture and painting, Pard Morrison invites investigation into his ever-evolving artistic quest, which for him, passionately merges the physical and the ethereal to locate humanity within the greater universal equation.

Pard Morrison holds a BFA in sculpture from Colorado State University, Fort Collins, CO. His work is included in permanent collections in the US and abroad including the United States Embassy, The Hague, Netherlands, the Phoenix Art Museum, The Collection of Agnes Martin, the Lannan Foundation, Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation, Colorado State University Art Museum, University of Wyoming Art Museum, Colorado Springs Fine Art Center, the City of Denver, Tulane University and Fidelity Investments, among others. Museum exhibitions include a solo exhibition at the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art, Boulder, CO as well as group presentations at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, NM, Louisiana Art and Science Museum, Baton Rouge, LA, and Colorado State University Art Museum, Fort Collins, CO. Morrison’s work has also been exhibited at the Lannan Foundation, Santa Fe, NM and the Arvada Center for The Arts, Denver, CO, and Denver Botanic Gardens, Denver, CO with additional national and international exhibitions.