The Los Angeles-based painter Rebecca Morris is an obsessive abstractionist. The grid serves as her compositional playground where shapes and colors frolic and meander. The 21-year survey exhibition “Rebecca Morris: 2001-2022,” at the Institute of Contemporary Art presents a dynamic group of rigorous large-scale paintings that reveal the artist’s longstanding commitment to abstraction. Morris’s work has always resisted definition and categorization–a quality I appreciate and struggle with as I try to find adequate words to describe her strange multivalent paintings. There is, however, one consistency in her work–the grid motif. Weird shapes in spray paint and globs of oil squirm in and around these taut borders. This kind of painting is awkward, even ugly at times, in a way that continues to enthrall me. Upon leaving the gallery, the artist’s words ABSTRACTION FOREVER! (from her famous 1994 manifesto) ring in my ears.

Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles
1717 E 7th Street
Los Angeles, CA 90021
On view through January 15, 2023