Alice Morey / Conditioning Demands
4.6.2022 — 18.9.2022
MEWO Kunsthalle Bahnhofstraße 1 D–87700 Memmingen
In her experiment-based practice, Alice Morey problematises how materials, plants, microorganisms and other non-human entities are commodified. Her paintings and installations appear as processual attempts to establish a symbiotic and non-violent relationship with our environs: on canvases, probiotic yoghurt bacteria cultures interact with pigments; curative herbs dye textiles which have been submerged in waters for months; pictorial surfaces are exposed to the influences of weather and the environment. What remains unclear, however, is whether these attempts reproduce the very exploitative relationships they actually seek to combat. Fragility, healing and aggression characterise these relational and contradictory attempts at coexistence with non-human entities. For her first institutional solo exhibition at MEWO Kunsthalle, Morey has created a new group of works dedicated to her years-long experimentation with pigments and bacteria from yoghurt. The works deal with fundamental processes of painting and suggest an alternative way, which embeds painterly means into the biological life cycle and understands them beyond sterile fixation. Various paintings show abstract forms and surfaces that result from the co-operation of pigments, the painter's hand and microorganisms. The canvas becomes the material meeting ground for heterogeneous agencies. A stage-like dimension is added by another work: in hand-blown glass vessels, art-historically significant pigments, such as lapis lazuli and malachite, react with a bacterial solution over the duration of the exhibition. Due to the formation of moulds, the pigments get into a state of constant motion. The installation appears like a futuristic laboratory in which painting is to be liberated from a mode of production oriented towards consumption and marked by exploitation.
Alice Morey (born 1986 in London) lives and works in Berlin and London. She studied painting at the University of Brighton and fine arts at Chelsea College of Arts.
The show is the third part of the exhibition project One Thing Left to Try. curated by Lorenzo Graf