Morgan Stokes
CV
Selected Works
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©2026
Art SG 2026
with Curatorial+Co.
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Black Matter
Richeldis Fine Art, Barcelona
October - December 2025
View
Morgan Stokes
CV
Instagram
Art SG 2026
with Curatorial+Co.
View
Black Matter
Richeldis Fine Art, Barcelona
October - December 2025
View
Exoskeleton
Solo presentation at Art SG
Singapore
The exoskeleton is a hardened exterior, the protective shell that mediates between interior essence and external world. In nature, the exoskeleton is both armour and interface, a boundary that defines the relationship between self and environment. Stokes’ presentation for Art SG extends the inquiry begun in Skeleton (2024), pushing further into the paradoxes that emerge when painting, once championed by Greenberg as the ultimate flat object, becomes a physical entity increasingly encountered through the glowing flatness of a screen.
There is a particular irony at play here: the Greenbergian insistence on painting’s essential flatness, its rejection of illusionistic depth in favour of honest two-dimensionality, now finds itself reversed in the digital age. The painting, that most stubbornly physical of objects, is routinely mediated, flattened again but this time into pixels, its materiality compressed into light. The question is no longer whether painting can acknowledge its flatness, but whether it can assert its physicality at all.
The exhibition establishes a conversation between extremes of materiality. Translucent silk works, suspended and permeable, allow light to pass through them, their surfaces shifting with ambient conditions. Against these, dense metal pieces anchor the space with their weight and opacity. Central to the presentation is the suspended installation Provisional Sculpture, 2025, which extends this inquiry into three dimensions as a study in mass and volume. A suspended rock hovers atop its glass relation; yet what is being tested here? Balance, weight, material interaction certainly, but perhaps also the fragility of perception itself. A reflective plinth anchors the work below, offering an alternative perspective through its surface, leaving open the question of where the work truly resides: in the objects themselves, in their precarious arrangement, or in the space between matter and its reflection.
Stokes continues to strip painting of its assumed functions, reducing it to constituent elements not to diminish but to intensify. Each component is isolated and reconsidered, tested for its capacity to generate meaning through sheer presence. The viewer is confronted not with representation but with manifestation, not with image but with thing. This insistence on objecthood becomes increasingly urgent in an age when the screen threatens to convert all physical matter into visual information, all substance into surface.
The exoskeleton, then, is both literal and metaphorical; a hardened interface between the internal logic of painting and the external pressures of contemporary viewing. It is the form that painting must assume to survive in an age of immateriality, a protective shell that paradoxically exposes its own construction. In making visible the architecture that supports and contains, Stokes asks us to reconsider what remains essential when everything can be reproduced, circulated and consumed as pure image. What cannot be translated through a screen? What insists on being encountered rather than viewed?
The paintings become organisms adapted to an environment where the physical must constantly negotiate with the virtual. They bear their structures on the outside, visible and vulnerable, insisting that something irreducible remains in the space between object and observer, in the shared air of the gallery, in the bodily encounter that no screen can fully replicate.