Mali Morris

The British painter Mali Morris's career stretches over forty years. Her experiments with colour, layering, and pictorial space have made her one of the most intriguing abstract artists working in Britain today. She draws inspiration from the art of the past - from the paintings of Manet and Velazquez, and the chromatic intensities of Matisse, Indian miniatures and the Sienese masters - as well as acknowledging influence from such twentieth-century artists as Helen Frankenthaler, Hans Hofmann and Milton Avery. The contemporary vitality of her work comes from its inventiveness, always moving her painting forwards. She says her work falls into 'families' - individual paintings that reach out for one another - and that she uses colour as an 'entity' in itself, a way of constructing luminosity, rather than a description of something outside the work. In extracts from her own writings included here, she compares painting with the work of poetry, with its similar aim of compression, finding form for feeling through language. This book is the first to present the full range of Morris's stunning paintings, alongside an insightful essay by Sam Cornish that evaluates the influence and importance of her work, an illustrated chronology, and a preface by the art historian Mel Gooding.