Morgan Stokes

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©2025  




Current

Where The Body Ends, R.M.Williams Residency, Sydney/Cadi, March-June 2025


Upcoming

Virgin, Oigåll Projects, Melbourne/Narrm, June 2025
Richeldis Fine Art, Barcelona, October-December 2025

2025



Where The Body Ends

R.M. Williams Residency
Sydney/Cadi, Australia

March-June 2025



Catalogue EssayMorgan Stokes’ R.M.Williams series, Where The Body Ends, delves into the material history of a storied Australian icon, reimagining the interplay of craft, material, and experience. This body of work is both a homage and a critique – a meditation on the tactility and cultural weight of the materials that shape objects and lives. Stokes’ practice, known for its interrogation of the medium of painting, extends here into a realm where questions of craftsmanship meets conceptual exploration. Referencing Josef Albers' Homage To The Square, Stokes transposes Albers’ chromatic studies into an exploration of material dialogue. Where Albers tested the perception of colour, Stokes shifts the inquiry to surfaces, textures, and the histories they carry.

The works in Where The Body Ends are formal studies in materiality, bridging the traditional components of painting – stretcher bars, cloth, and paint – with remnants of R.M.Williams’ legacy; discontinued lines of leather and suede salvaged from the company’s Adelaide factory. This fusion of artistic and artisanal materials interrogates notions of value and obsolescence, highlighting the liminal space between utility and aesthetics. The leather and suede, imbued with histories of labour and durability,
are transformed into surfaces that are at once subdued and bold, rational and irrational, spontaneous and considered, their textures and tones pushing the viewer into an encounter with the unexpected.

Stokes emphasises texture as a point of tension within this body of work. The leather’s rugged tactility confronts the ghostliness of silk, while paint acts as both mediator and disruptor. Each work embodies a negotiation of boundaries – between body and material, utility and ornament, permanence and decay. Through this series, Stokes reframes the relationship between material and maker, history and presence. Where The Body Ends is not only a study of material histories but also a poetic inquiry into the limits and possibilities of matter itself, asking how the textures of our lived experience are woven into the things we leave behind.




Homage Painting (Leather & Silk), 110 x 90cm, 2025, silk organza, polyester, canvas, R.M. Williams leather.
Homage Painting (Black Canvas) (detail)




Homage Painting (Canvas), 58.5 x 48.5cm, 2025. 
Pigment and acrylic on canvas, linen, hessian.
Homage Painting (Canvas) (detail)
Functional Painting, 150x118cm, 2025. 
Acrylic and pigment on stitched linen, canvas, hessian.
Functional Painting (detail)
Body/Space Painting 1 (detai)
Body/Space Painting 1 & 2, 33 x 27.5cm (each), 2025.
R.M. Williams leather, silk organza, Australian Pine, pastel and stain, polyester organza, Australian Pine.
Homage Painting (Silk & Canvas), 133 x 108cm, 2025.
Acrylic and pigment on canvas, silk organza
Homage Painting (Silk & Canvas) (detail)
Horse, 30 x 30cm, 2025.
R.M. Williams shoe, automative paint, exhaust pipe, leather string, mirrored acrylic base (detail)
Horse, 30 x 30cm, 2025.
R.M. Williams shoe, automative paint, exhaust pipe, leather string, mirrored acrylic base
Horse, 30 x 30cm, 2025.
R.M. Williams shoe, automative paint, exhaust pipe, leather string, mirrored acrylic base
Limits Painting, 55 x 48.5cm, 2025.
Pigment and acrylic on canvas, silk organza.
Homage Painting (Black Canvas), 58.5 x 48.5cm, 2025.
Pigment and acrylic on canvas, linen, hessian.
Homage Painting (Black Canvas) (detail)
Homage Painting (Leather & Silk), 110 x 90cm, 2025.
Silk organza, polyester, R.M. Williams leather.
Homage Painting (Leather & Silk) (detail)





2024






Skeleton

Curatorial+Co.
Sydney/Cadi, Australia

October 2024



Catalogue Essay
“We are now offered the illusion of modalities: namely, that matter is incorporeal, weightless and exists optically like a mirage”
Clement Greenberg, 1967 (from Art & Objecthood by Michael Fried, Art Forum 1967)

What significance can be found in the structure of something? A skeleton gives shape and coherence to a body. It symbolises the bare essence, the stripped-down truth and thus it also becomes a symbol for the pursuit of authenticity. A skeleton is also death and mortality, like the vanitas, it is a reminder of the transience of life; the temporal against the eternal. Just as the skeletal frame provides both constraint and possibility for movement in a living being, the underlying principles and frameworks in art both limit and liberate.

Following Stokes’ previous exhibition with Curatorial+Co., Skin, which examined the outermost layer, Skeleton flays the surface to examine within. Although the show hums with a naked, elemental current, tensions define the space: lightness vs darkness, lightness vs heaviness, fullness vs emptiness, creation vs destruction, object vs subject. Balance, tone, space and, pertinently, form: the elements of painting have been amputated from one another to be scrutinised in a material dimension. This emphasis on form further serves to underscore a certain physicality thus the show becomes a meditative exploration of not only the medium of painting and what lies beneath it’s surface, but also the visceral act of sharing space with matter. That is to say, Skeleton is an exploration of an unseen essentialness
Evident here is Stokes’ continuing preoccupation in how our mode of perceptions change as the world becomes increasingly mediated by the screen. The works embody a corporeality, they are studies in matter and not images, and can be seen as formal exercises in reduction to understand the vitality of form and material. Echoing a minimalist aesthetic, the works become performers, they must be experienced in a situation aware of a participant and consequently the beholder becomes the subject. Stokes is not only investigating the objecthood of painting, he seeks to imbue matter with a philosophical resonance in an age of the immaterial.  

Morgan Stokes’ artistic practice delves into the mediums of painting and sculpture, deconstructing them to their fundamental elements. Beginning with the traditional building blocks of each; pigment, cloth, stretcher bars, stone, he embarks upon a process of reinterpretation, interrogating the supposed value of each part and its role within the widely understood formula of what makes an artwork. Both literal and philosophical, Skeleton is a dialogue between body and material; a contemplation on what makes a painting in the digital age. Recalling the movements of Arte Povera, Mono-Ha and Material Realism and considered from a post-internet lens, Skeleton transcends the canvas, acting as a meditation on creation and art, the seen and the unseen.
















2024





Studies for Richeldis (2024)

Richeldis Fine Art
London, UK

May 2024











2023



Skin

Curatorial+Co.
Sydney/Cadi, Australia

March-June 2025



Catalogue Essay 
A Glitch In Time
by Steph Wade
We can trace the invention of some of humanity’s most fundamental practices back to the prehistoric age, some 2.5 million years ago until 10,000 B.C.: language, scientific inquiry, spirituality, religion, and art. Small sculptures and cave paintings are known to modern scholars to have first emerged from these early Paleolithic humans. Among the most common subject matter was stencils and paintings of hands; feeling the fleshliness of skin to trace the outline of one’s physicality. 

Such paintings, at that point in history, were not merely the product of inattentive doodling, but required considerable planning to obtain the materials needed to ground up a paste resembling paint—charcoal, clay, rocks, and animal fats and blood, sometimes collected from miles away—used to depict and engrave figurative paintings on the rough, textural walls of caves.

What themes or desires do these works represent? Archaeologists have many theories, but the fact is it is anyone’s guess. Perhaps part of it was about connecting with one’s physical surroundings; using our skin as a starting point to be in contact with the natural world. 

Or maybe it was about creating for the sake of creation. Art then, it should be said, is a primordial act; the oldest and purest mode of creative expression that exists to render our situations and experiences into something tangible. 

Material helps with this. In 1969, the legendary land artist Michael Heizer had an idea for a large-scale sculpture using an obscenely heavy rock, born from his time living in the arid Nevada desert. It took many decades to realise, and was a logistical nightmare, yet in 2012, a 150 million-year-old rock weighing a whopping 340 tonnes was transported from the desert to Los Angeles to form Levitated Mass (2012), a public art installation and cultural phenomenon. 

Why are we so enthralled by a rock? The fascination with this piece of art becomes clearer when you consider that researchers are still scratching their heads over how the Great Pyramids of Giza were built some four thousand years ago. Heizer’s installation, like others of this calibre, has us yo-yoing with spiritual impulse from the present to the Middle Ages, and back to prehistoric times when the rock was formed. History, presence, and future coalesce. 

***

Consider skin as a noun: the outer layer, or surface, of a body; the barrier between what is inside and outside, the ultimate emblem for embodiment. To touch the skin on your body and feel your presence in the world is to jolt yourself into the here and now. 

Alberto Burri (1915–1995), a key innovator in the history of 20th-century art, pioneered a range of techniques to create his paintings and sculptures: layering, stitching, and sewing together sections of fabric, scratching, ripping, and burning holes, melting hard materials and cracking paint into patterns attributed to natural decay. This is Burri’s Material Realism: the representation of the formal, physical properties of materials, nothing more. Yet there is a tactile and visceral quality to his works that seems to emphasise the ageing process. 

Now consider skin as a verb: to shed, or outgrow, one’s skin. A few key motifs emerge here in the inevitability of rebirth, renewal, and transformation. With this comes a metaphor in the reckoning of our current time: we know that the structural systems of the Global North—such as the enmeshment of technology with personhood and domination—can no longer hold or sustain us. They need to be shed in order for something new to emerge.
American professor Donna Haraway famously asked in her seminal 1985 essay A Cyborg Manifesto, “Why should our bodies end at the skin?”, a question more pertinent today than ever, when considering our messy inability to set boundaries with technological advancements. “Technology is not neutral. We’re inside of what we make, and it’s inside of us,” Haraway says. 

Or in other words, the creepy link between us and the virtual world has become so entangled that we don’t even know where we end and where technology begins. Time with friends becomes an opportunity to produce content; commutes are chances to increase productivity. Boredom ended in 2007. Everything physical has become indistinguishable from the internet, and there is seemingly little use for creation without a purpose. 

The exhibition ‘Skin’ was conceived to explore these ideas. It is a framework to understanding painting as a metaphor for personhood, and surface as a metaphor for skin. Morgan Stokes is drawn to subject matter that is anchored in everyday life but has a metaphysical interpretation. In his previous exhibition ‘Virtual Gaze’, the artist questioned the dissonance between experiencing art online versus in real life. Yet where he ruminated on the virtual world through painting and sculpture, with this new body of work, Stokes meditates on existence in, and perception of, the physical world around us. 

Inspired by techniques and forms seen in Alberto Burri’s Material Realism, art movements like the Korean Dansaekhwa and Post-Minimalism, and the suspended sculptures of Jose Dávila, the works in ‘Skin’ are reduced in order to emphasise their materiality. Surfaces of the canvases form a type of skin, constructed through repetitive actions that create highly textured surfaces. 

In a way, his paintings explore the dynamic traits of skin—its vulnerabilities to space and time and its unique irregularities. In some works, traditional painting materials such as linen and canvas are torn up and reconstructed; perhaps questioning what makes a painting in the digital age. Silk, metal and clothing stand in for canvas in others, our eyes question the surface. Elsewhere, the fabric stretches or expands depending on the level of humidity; the painting breathes and changes, it is not a static image. 
  
Rocks are used in both paintings and sculptures, their raw mass and prehistory palpable, standing in contrast to the modern mass-manufactured linens and fabrics surrounding them. This contrast is what compels the show; somehow, a primal sensibility runs through the works—almost as if you’re in a cave, rather than a gallery. Indeed, the artist examined cave paintings for inspiration materially, texturally, and compositionally. Looking to the past, from the lens of the future, as a means to make sense of the physical world. 

Over many thousands of years, the surfaces where art materialises have changed; each was fitting depending on the specific point in time. Caves, temples, tombs, rock walls, palaces, churches, buildings, gallery walls—and now, screens. As technology strangles our every waking moment, maybe staring at primary matter is satisfying because it hits some primal nerve; a reminder that we continue to be severed from nature. A back-to-front world. 

Amidst our digital dystopia, ‘Skin’ recalls the origins of art, the nature of creation, and the role of material in an increasingly material-free culture. It is a reminder of what came before us and what will remain after we’re gone. History, presence, and future coalesce. The intention? To see our own skin.












2023



Gæst

Pakhuset Galleriet
Nykøbing Sjælland, Denmark

October-November 2023













2022






Virtual Gaze

Curatorial+Co.
Sydney/Cadi, Australia

March 2022



Catalogue Essay‘Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.’ 

- Walter Benjamin 
The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction (1936)

As the pandemic unfolded, our world view inadvertently shifted from the physical to the virtual. Our loved ones and colleagues were rendered to the maximum degree of pixel density our devices could handle; we became our front-cameras. The tradition of illusion in art shifted into our palms and we were now the illusion; every online image a masterpiece of trompe l’oeil. 

Of course, well before the pandemic, we willingly became devoted subjects of surveillance capitalism, embracing a marked escalation in technological addiction framed by a backdrop of environmental and economic catastrophe. The subsequent governmentally and socially enforced separation only served to underscore our late-capitalist mentalities: we are alone, but technology can save us. Accepting the pandemic as our final, complete baptismal immersion into hyperreality (in case there were any specks of reality still lingering), one recalls the French philosopher Guy Debord’s pithy 1967 Society of the Spectacle portending, “the spectacle reunites the separate, but reunites it as separate.”

Surveillance capitalism, to underscore, is an economic system focused on the commodification of personal data with the express purpose of generating profit. Baudrillard defines hyperreality as “the generation by models of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreality”. Reality is no longer discernible as we live in our blessed, optimised, panopticon lives. We’ve exchanged our natural personhood to become branded commodities emancipated from the shackles of history, free to curate our personal newsfeeds with maximum algorithmic effect. At the same time, we are ironically shackled indelibly to our own personal histories as every moment is recorded with or without our consent. Time and space, the two constants, are no longer that constant.

Virtual Gaze has been created with these ideas in mind. The screen is the muse: both its contents and its surface. Each work ruminates on the virtual world through the mediums of painting and sculpture. The works are formal studies into material properties of what comprises a painting or sculpture (for example paint, canvas or

stretcher bars) underscoring them as physical objects and therefore exploring their verisimilitude, their reality versus virtuality. They are not images to scroll past, they are paintings. The sparseness of the works disrupt a traditional reading of art - and digital images - where subtly of texture and materiality become vehicles for meaning. Narrative can be interpreted through material, through perception and light, through the sharing of a unique space and time between human and work. 

The French painter Charles Lapicque said that the creative act should offer as much surprise as life itself. Silk obscures and enhances, offering a tech-esque shimmer and obfuscation. Heavily worked metal sits alongside natural linen beside raw rock, an orgy of cavelike primitivism and sophisticated mechanically-produced synthetic material. The imperfect stitch and the few visible marks become focal points and exist almost as accidents: their existence linger as human question marks, as ontological smudges. 

Artworks are sometimes arranged as a screen may be, constructed from arranged pixels. The composition for the work, ‘Situating our dreams’, was taken from a composition algorithm generator commissioned for and made by a coder in Ukraine. ‘#FFF3D3’ is a combination of studies translating a digital colour (the hex value of the title) into panels using a variety of media and surfaces, interpreting the colour at different times of the day and in different lights. ‘A primal condition’ was created through seeping colour through the reverse of the canvas, using the texture of the paint and material to dictate appearance. Metal works evoke the industrial nature of the screen, but at the same time contradict this perfection through their organic, vulnerable makeup.

Ironically the JPGs of ‘Virtual gaze’ will become the end product in the lifecycle of the works and will be the way the works will be largely viewed and remembered, reproduced any number of times. The philosopher Walter Benjamin said that technology drove a shift from art as something of contemplation to that of distraction because of its reproducibility. Technology directly impacts sense and perception, two factors which ultimately affect “humanity’s entire mode of existence”. In a world where we are the product, where we are endlessly reproduced in the hyperreal, you might wonder what Benjamin would say about humanity’s current mode of existence.
























2021






Concerning Existence

Curatorial+Co.
Sydney/Cadi, Australia

May-June 2021



Catalogue EssayExploring the concept of what he calls the ‘virtual gaze’, Morgan Stokes investigates the painting as an object, as opposed to an image.

Despite their appearance, Stokes’ works are a rumination on the virtual world, each a response to our escalating entrapment within our screens. Approaching works from a post-internet school of thought with a post-minimalist sensibility, Stokes’ works seek to explore the physicality of painting as well as the way we perceive image itself.
Each piece is an enquiry into the medium of painting, exploring and exploiting the material properties of paint, canvas and timber. Yet at the same time they are explorations developed through the lens of the screen and, as such, are self-referential products of Adobe tools: cut & paste, the eyedropper to pick colours, the brush to create marks, the gradient function.

Eschewing a manicured, well-rendered illusion in favour of sparse canvases with few, self-conscious strokes, a cynical thread runs through his pieces. They are aware of themselves as paintings and as eventual JPGs; they waver between something to look at and something to scroll past. Existing as interstices, the pace of the works lie in direct contrast to the speed of online, requiring an observational discipline.

Each painting is a formal study in colour and material, overlaid with marks which appear both accidental yet mechanical, intuitive yet intentional. They strive to be honest and abject yet covertly exist otherwise: marks made by a robot vacuum echo human marks; synthetic iridescent vinyl sits atop raw canvas; contrived organic colours live beside the real thing. Stepping back, the overall effect ranges from introspective and melancholic to sardonic.

Ironically the JPGs, which will become the end product in the lifecycle of the works, will be the way the works will be largely viewed and remembered. Any nuance or corporeality will be abolished when shifted online, completing the full circle from digital conception to painterly work back to virtuality.





















2020




Various Works

2020