There may appear little good reason to place the works of Annie Morris together with those of Idris Khan. Morris obsessively explores line and colour to create art which is raw and bold in appearance, while Khan’s sleek paintings and meticulously ordered sculptures are quiet and pensive. Their sources of inspiration differ, and their artistic investigation couldn’t be more separate. Yet there is a shared sympathy in the work, a joint history which relates one to the other. Morris and Khan, both born in 1978, have been married since 2009, fourteen years at the time of this exhibition at Newlands House. Like many artist couples, they each have a distinct practice with certain touchpoints that are curious and revealing. To date, they have collaborated on just a single project, choosing otherwise to maintain their artistic independence from each other.

Artist couples are abundant in history. As artists met and communed, at times they engaged in passionate, creative and sometimes tumultuous romances. Perhaps the most cited are Surrealist painter Frida Kahlo and prominent muralist Diego Rivera in Mexico. Twenty years Kahlo’s senior, Rivera was already an established artist when they first met. Kahlo had hoped Rivera would become her mentor, and they became romantically engaged, eventually marrying in 1929 despite the disapproval of Kahlo’s family, who nicknamed the pair ‘the elephant and the dove’.

Their relationship was turbulent, plagued by rivalry and infidelity. Kahlo notoriously had a brief affair with Soviet revolutionary Leon Trotsky while she and Rivera were offering him political asylum in their home. Rivera had an affair with Kahlo’s sister, wounding the artist profoundly and compounding the life-long physical and psychological pain she already suffered as a result of a bus accident when she was eighteen. Rivera’s affair led the couple to divorce in 1940, but they remarried in 1941 and remained together for the rest of Kahlo’s life. When she died in 1954, Rivera said it was the hardest tragedy he had to endure. Their lives read like a movie script.

Kahlo found solace in her art. She completed her first self-portrait during her three-month convalescence, in bed with a body cast, after the bus accident. Painting was her outlet and much of her work is steeped in autobiographical details such as her cultural history, her miscarriages and her political views. Morris too has employed a similar method of gathering her personal experiences and pain and pouring them into her art, as in her Stack series (from 2014). Though these personal experiences are more hidden in her work than in Kahlo’s more explicit paintings, they are where the strength of her art lies.

Perhaps her most recognisable work, the Stack series are sculptures assembled of spheres threaded one on top of the other, each in a different colour. The series started in response to a stillbirth she experienced in 2010, with her grief driving her to create. The irregular spheres, precariously arranged into tall columns, evoke the swelling bellies of pregnancy. Sculpted in plaster and sand, the forms are painted with hand-sourced raw pigments in vivid colours such as ultramarine, viridian and ochre, which give the misshapen orbs a rich, vibrant hue.

Citing a near-obsession with colour, Morris’s works with raw pigment investigate colour as an essential part of how we experience the world. More than a century after Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s theoretical analysis of the emotional hues of colour, Kahlo too contemplated the question from a far more intuitive standpoint, as she noted in her diaries as a young woman. The journal entry is a lyrical stream-of-consciousness meditation on the symbolism of different colours inspired by an assortment of coloured pencils at her desk: ‘I’ll try out the pencils sharpened to the point of infinity which always sees ahead.’ She notes that green is a good warm light and blue an electricity and purity of love, while yellow is ‘madness sickness fear, part of the sun and of happiness’: she associates happiness and madess together in her work, while about black she comments: ‘Nothing is black – really nothing.’[1]

Morris follows a similar line of investigation with her Stack series. She also uses the intense Kahlo hues, while taking great pains to select which colours she might place together for the desired emotional response in her viewers. She has also developed a technique in which the raw pigment is mixed with sand and seems to be lightly compressed on the surface, creating an impression of fragility. To touch it would agitate the pigment and destroy the work, it seems, creating a duality: the strength of the colour paired with the frailty of the substance. Poignantly, she says that by keeping the pigment raw, it remains alive. Surprisingly, though these works are totemic in shape, they are in no way phallic, signifying a new vernacular in sculpture, which moves away from the male ideal established by the male-dominated world of sculpture.

The linking of this series to her personal tragedy has become public almost accidentally, after Morris discussed it in an interview. The artist had always wished for the work to be seen as a celebration of life and colour, but since the origins of the sculptures have become known  online, they have become part of their legend. As with Kahlo, the art is there to help find order in an existence that includes grief, pain and disappointment. That the output is full of joy only speaks to Morris’s resolute spirit and defiance in the face of adversity.

Morris studied at Central Saint Martins before completing her studies at the École de Beaux-Arts, Paris, and then the Slade School of Fine Art in London. She employs a variety of materials and media including sculpture, painting, tapestry and drawing, which are full of gestural freedom and explore the subconscious mind. As mentioned, the initial impression of her art is of a practice that is bright and joyful, with striking colours and a zesty palette producing an uplifting effect. Scratch the surface, however, and one discovers a much more profound reality. Her work is a manifestation of the struggles in a woman’s life. As Morris explains, the journey to her creative process always begins with drawing, regardless of her final work. 

Her drawings, such as the oil-stick drawings featured in the exhibition (this is a problem – the studio has not released any titles for the drawings yet. Can we get around this without having to use a title?) , are bold and quick, transmitted from mind to hand in a stream of consciousness, with instinct guiding her across the page rather than extensive design planning. She draws figures, abstract forms, cyphers and symbols, creating her own iconography as she goes along. Pablo Picasso was once asked whether he knew, when he started it, what a painting was going to look like when it was finished. ‘No, of course not,’ he is supposed to have replied. ‘If I knew, I wouldn't bother doing it.’

 As with Kahlo’s intuitive assignments to colour, Morris leaves much to chance, surprising herself with the result. An example of this is the Flower Woman [is this just a motif, not the title of a work?again, im not sure. They are how she calls the motif in the work – she might very wall also title the work Flower Woman…], a reoccurring motif in Morris’s drawings. What started as a portrait of her mother, over time and repetition, morphed into a self-portrait. The drawing is of a woman’s body with the head, and therefore face, replaced by a flower. As Morris explains:

The Flower Woman came about many years ago, kind of as a way of making a self-portrait. It was to do with something that happened within our family. I wanted to abandon any face – I like the emotion that you get from it being scribbled – and the petals made me think about how transient things are, the beauty of a flower disappearing. I like the fact that she creeps back into a lot of my drawings.

In her tapestry works, Morris stitches her frantic drawings into the wall hangings, creating an image which is at once freehand and deliberate. Though the work might seem spontaneous, it involves a laborious process of sewing the lines into the fabric. Being neither sculpture not drawing, they occupy a space in between. The motifs reappear from tapestry to tapestry and the line is broken and fragile. Looking at the tapestry, one’s eyes dart from one motif to the next. There is nowhere to rest, nowhere that calms the viewer. The restlessness is all-consuming. Her artist books similarly serve as a visual mind-map diary. Morris draws her books on a regular basis so that as time passes, the motifs transform as their stories develop. Morris’ day to day influences are, therefore, noted, her emotional journey charted on the paper.  

The theme of repetition is at the centre of Morris’s work. In her drawings, by repeating the imagery and allowing it to develop, the artist is employing repetition as a creative device to arrive to an end point. This is reflected in her tapestry and sculpture, in the repetitive gesture of the needle piercing the fabric and the repetitive stacking of her colourful spheres. As Morris says: ‘What I wanted to do was to create one idea and to repeat it and repeat it, getting more and more abstract so that you’d just be left with these simple shapes. It’s why I keep repeating imagery, to get to a new place with it.’[2] Viewing her work in an exhibition context, one is struck when entering the gallery by the rhythmic repetition of the sculptures, both as they are positioned side by side and as the eye is drawn up the spheres and to the heavens.    

Stepping back and looking at her drawings from a distance, they read like a mind-map or blueprint reminiscent of the drawings of Jean-Michel Basquiat. He too drew in a stream-of-consciousness flow with a child-like aesthetic, using his experiences to shape the subjects of his works. Anything around him could potentially become part of his painting. Like Morris, he used a plethora of symbols for his audiences to absorb and interpret, the sum of which are often seen as biographical.

Basquiat was involved in an artist relationship with Andy Warhol. Although it is unlikely to have been sexual, their six-year friendship was intense and hugely influential on both artists. It resulted in numerous collaborative works and photographs, and was and remains an art relationship that captures the public’s fascination. Warhol became Basquiat's landlord, they had regular phone conversations and travelled together, and Warhol visited Basquiat’s family in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, for a meal. The intensity of their friendship was playfully captured in the 1984 datebook he gifted Warhol, in which Basquiat wrote his name each day for an appointment at 8am. They have become the archetypal symbol of what happens when two creative worlds entwine. The young Basquiat brought graffiti and jazz culture into the world of the Pop master, who in turn opened up new possibilities for Basquiat. As Warhol’s studio assistant Ronnie Cutrone described it, ‘It was like some crazy-art world marriage and they were the odd couple. The relationship was symbiotic. Jean-Michel thought he needed Andy's fame, and Andy thought he needed Jean-Michel's new blood. Jean-Michel gave Andy a rebellious image again.’[3]

Warhol is an interesting artist to consider when looking at the power of repetition in art. It is a technique he used in many of his screen-print works, in which he often repeated an image on the same canvas, as in his 1963 words Double Elvis and Silver Car Crash (Double Disaster). Rather than diluting the effect, repetition in art emphasises, underlining the importance of the subject. The double Elvis looks like a vision, while the crash scene echoes the horror across the canvas. What Warhol is highlighting is a sense of mindlessness through mechanical reproduction, and that people have been desensitised by the repeated exposure to images of violence and celebrity, through media outlets and advertising.  

Khan also conjures a sense of mindlessness through repetition in his stamp works, but of a different quality. Where Warhol used a mechanical process, Khan’s pieces are handmade, with the weight of his wrist captured in each stamp impression. In these works, Khan’s repetition is akin to that of a chant, where the resulting mindlessness is a form of escape for the artist from his personal tragedy, the aforementioned stillbirth. Like Morris, Khan turned to his art to try to process his heartache. He started writing down his feelings in poetry, and then made a rubber stamp from the lines of text. He stamped the texts on top of each other, repetitively and in a circle. The process of creating the repetitive, cyclical pattern was cathartic and therapeutic for Khan. It was the start of his series of radiating stamped glass works, in which he layers sheets of glass to give another dimension of depth to the pattern. The words lose their meaning as they are no longer legible but, as Basquiat observed when discussing his own work: ‘Cross out words so you will see them more; the fact that they are obscured makes you want to read them.’[4] Khan has adopted this process for various works such as The Beginning 2016, in which the occasional phrase is visible through a burst of colour, and the work resembles a mandala radiating from a point of origin.

The shared experience of the stillbirth prompted both Khan and Morris to find solace in their art and moved their practice in a new direction. Motifs of layers and rhythm are present in both, though the formal work differs greatly. 

Khan was born in Birmingham and grew up in Walsall, a market town in the West Midlands. He initially studied photography at the University of Derby, and the camera was his first creative tool. Although his practice has branched out to different media, his interest in time persists, the camera being the means of capturing a moment. Khan studied for a Master’s degree at the Royal College of Art, and he considers this period as formative. London, the RCA, and all that was suddenly readily available to him as an artist overwhelmed him:

For the first year of the Royal College I kind of stopped making photographs, having gone there always wanting to make pictures. Suddenly I was surrounded by all these incredibly intelligent people who were exposing me to new influences … it was almost like this overload of culture, of information, and I didn’t quite know how to process it into my art.[5]

Khan explains that he first became interested in the process of layering when he placed one X-ray on top of another. His father, a surgeon, often kept X-rays at home, which allowed Khan to contemplate them. The ghostly, haunted appearance of the X-rays struck Khan as interesting, and it is an aesthetic he returns to time and again in his work, even in his video art, as can be seen in Lying in Wait 2008. The figure of dancer Sarah Warsop glides across the library setting, repeating movements which, as they layer on top of each other, rustle on the soundtrack like an apparition.

One of the first pieces of Khan’s that drew critical attention was every ... page of the Holy Qur’an 2004. Here, instead of drawing on the Qur’an as a source of inspiration, he uses the book as a material in his work. Khan photographed each page of the Holy Book and layered one image on top of another as transparencies, invoking the X-ray aesthetic. The work took two months to complete. The resulting effect is that of an illegible pattern, a soft fraying of lines that is geometric and abstract. Conceptually, one is looking at multiple points in time at once, which was also a Cubist concern. Like Schrödinger’s cat, Khan’s work is both dead and alive at the same time. The book is there for us to see, but we cannot see it. It speaks of an ambivalence about his birth religion, an anxiety about his past but still a need to connect with it. He is finding his own way of celebrating his cultural tradition, though with apparently melancholic undertones.

To look into Khan’s practice is to open oneself up to a plethora of source material. He draws on his interest in philosophy, music, art, poetry, religion, culture, architecture and literature, and uses them as sources in his work. As he did with the Qur’an, Khan will often use the object rather than its contents, as he explains, he looks to create ‘vibrations in an image that holds the weight of its cultural impact’.[6]

With his book projects, Khan has layered significant texts such as Every page … of Roland Barthes ‘Camera Lucida’2004, and Every … page of Susan Sontag's Book 'On Photography' 2004, as well as Sigmund Freud’s The Uncanny 2006, a publication which Khan considers a must on every artist’s reading list. In his own words, these are books that ‘inform us how to think’.[7] The layering of music scores in his work has included sheet music of Mozart’s Requiem, Beethoven’s sonatas and Schubert’s piano sonatas. In his selection, Khan is representing to his audience texts and music scores not as an influence in his work, but as a homage, underlining their significance in the advancement of culture and humanity.

Khan’s layering work on the one hand enacts a kind of destruction by blurring the source materials to the point of almost complete illegibility, but at the same time pays tribute to the original creators. In his homage to artist couple Bernd and Hilla Becher, he creates a snapshot of a period in time. Condensing the Becher’s decade-long project of photographing and documenting various industrial structures such as water towers and gas reservoirs, Khan is pointing to the obsessive nature of the project as well as presenting a melancholy reminder of the passage of time, one which is especially suitable in this context, given that most of the industrial-era structures the Bechers documented were destined for demolition.

It is through the process of photographing and layering that Khan is addressing a simple yet fundamentally complex question concerning time: how do we experience it and interact with it? One of his earliest works, White Court 2001, is a photograph of a squash-court wall, taken at his former primary school where his mother used to play. This image demonstrates Khan’s first fascination with the ability of photography to capture time. It is a poetic image, the court wall marked and dirtied by the beating ball, a trace left by one who is no longer (his mother died in 2010), one generation seen by another.

Khan’s interest in capturing time has led him to investigate various ways in which time might be represented. This also marks Khan’s move to sculpture. For his work 65,000 Photographs 2019, Khan printed on standard-sized photographic paper, and arranged in a reverse-pyramid shape, the photographs that he took on his phone over a five-year period. It is a critique on the abundance of image-making in our digital age, and the fact that most of the photographs we take on our phones are largely forgotten and discarded. Khan pulled and pushed the sheets of paper to create a ridged effect on the sides of the work, before sand-casting and forming it in aluminium. ‘It almost feels like the rings of a tree,’ he observes. ‘I’m not showing the pictures themselves; you’re just seeing the edges of the paper. It is about using the physicality of a photograph to show time.’[8]

Khan employed a similar process to create a portrait of his mother who died at the age of fifty-nine, in a sculpture titled My Mother 2019. He could only find 380 photographs from her life, and when he built the sculpture, My Mother stood at a height of 53.3cm, almost sixteen times smaller than 65,000 Photographs. The contrast between five years of a life with digital media and a whole lifetime without it is testament to the evolution of digital media and humanity’s use of it to document our existence.

Khan’s sculptures have a minimalist aesthetic, with Carl Andre being a much-cited influence by the artist.[9] Though his sculptures are stripped back and sleek, Khan’s have more in common with those by Sean Scully, an artist also presented at the galleries of Newlands House in the context of artist couples. Where Scully employs a minimal expressionist language in his works, they also contain a strong emotional element. Drawing on his life experience, there is often a story behind Scully’s sculptures, as in his Untitled (Coin Stack) 2018 sculpture. The pile of circular disks is a memory of when the artist’s father would stack his weekly wage on the living-room table, a reminder of the poverty his family had endured. While some minimalists looked to strip their art of all meaning, Scully and Khan insert meaning into the minimalist aesthetic, looking to provoke an emotional response in the viewer. To this end, although his practice is largely monochromatic, Khan does use a shade of ultramarine blue, as in New Blue Music Work 2022, for its ability to trigger emotion in the spectator. Where some will be uplifted looking at this shade of blue, others will have a negative response and will feel saddened.

A clear example of the way Khan and Morris have influenced each other’s practices is in the works they each created in 2019 and 2020, in the global lockdown caused by the Coronavirus pandemic. Leaving London and their studios for the Sussex countryside, Morris and Khan had to find a new way of creating art, and focused on drawing and painting rather than sculpture. They each chose the theme of the Four Seasons as their subject, with Khan focusing on Vivaldi’s baroque masterpiece as a springboard, and Morris on the physical passing of the seasons in the surrounding landscape.

For The Seasons Turn 2012, Khan created a series of twenty-eight watercolours inspired by the countryside, with influences by Morris leading him to add colour to his usual monochrome palette. Incorporating sheet music in these works, Khan elegantly fades the colour from shades of crimson and chestnut browns to citrus yellows and pungent greens, and allows the quality of the paper to absorb the pigment, bonding the music to the colour. As he says of the work, ‘I want the visitors in the gallery to walk around a year of the colours that were in my mind.’[10]

Where Morris could be attributed for inspiring colour into Khan’s practice, with her Four Seasons [is this the title of the work? – no it is not, but it is the work that came out of these circumstances and refers to the seasons] works we see her adopting Khan’s more monochromatic approach. Each season has been depicted in varying tones, referring to the changing colours of the seasons from winter to spring, summer to autumn, as Morris observed the vivid colours and changes in nature during the lockdown year.

It is perhaps clearer where the influence lies when the artist couples’ relationship extends beyond a romantic one and they collaborate overtly as an artist duo, as in the cases of Gilbert Prousch and George Passmore, or Marina Abramovic[ ‘c’ should have acute accent – SUSANNAH – please note] and Ulay. Prousch and Passmore, better known as Gilbert & George, met in 1967 while studying at St Martin’s School of Art, and embarked on a joint artistic career that has lasted over five decades. Their distinctive manner and appearance form the part of their practice that explores performance art, acting as a living sculpture. Likewise, Abramovic[add acute accent to ‘c’] and Ulay, who referred to themselves as ‘parts of a two-headed body’, worked to create art together that explored themes of identity and human nature. The artwork they created is seen as a clear collaboration, in which the two artists make the one artwork.

The creative collaboration of Annie Morris and Idris Khan is more subtle than the aforementioned artist couples. Their adult lives together, shared with their two children, extended families and pet dog, as well as their mutual interest in the arts, means that an influence on each other’s work was inevitable.

To compare them with other artist couples is but an entry point to understanding their art and the dualities and conflicts it represents. What binds their practices together, though it might not be at first apparent in the differing aesthetics that they use in their work, is a search to present an art which can be experienced as a pure emotion.

[1] https://www.themarginalian.org/2017/07/06/frida-kahlo-diary-color/

[2] https://www.trebuchet-magazine.com/annie-morris-the-hopefulness-of-colour/

[3] RONNIE CUTRONE, https://www.sothebys.com/en/articles/tale-of-two-legends-warhol-and-basquiat

[4] Jean-Michel Basquiat, ed. Rudy Chiappini, exh. cat., Museo d’Arte Moderna, Lugano, Switzerland (2005), p.87.

[5] Idris Khan, quoted in Idris Khan: A World Within, ed. Thomas Marks and Deborah Robinson, exh. cat., New Gallery, Walsall, UK (2017), p.126.

[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I95I7Ymk7PA

[7] Ibid.

[8] British Journal of Photography,  https://www.1854.photography/2019/11/idris-khan-65000-photographs/

[9] Carl Andre was accused of murdering his artist wife, so I will refrain from including them as examples of artist couples here.

[10] https://online.victoria-miro.com/idriskhan-the-seasons-turn/