MORRIS Lapidus, 2018

SARAH MORRIS
b. 1967, United Kingdom

Morris Lapidus, 2018

Custom fabricated porcelain tiles

Location: Miami Beach Convention Center Northeast Corner Exterior Walls

Morris Lapidus by Sarah Morris is an expansive, site-specific artwork commissioned by the City of Miami Beach. Executed in custom fabricated, hand-painted porcelain tile and covering over 7,000 square feet of exterior wall space, Morris Lapidus is one of the artist’s largest permanent installations to date.

Morris’s dynamic visual language invites the viewer to reflect upon the concepts of motion, scale, light and social space through the use of vectors, points, colour and geometric forms. Much like Morris’s paintings and films, site-specific installations such as Morris Lapidus seek to decode and initiate new dialogues with the structures and concepts that define the built environment.

Morris’s practice is rooted in the formulation of never-ending, all-encompassing networks of interlinked grids, forms, and colours that constantly expand beyond the immediate field of vision. In Morris Lapidus, this network extends further, into the public space. Delineating the edges of the building, Morris Lapidus challenges the meaning of the commercial space of the Miami Beach Convention Center, demanding that the spectator looks beyond the boundaries of their immediate field of vision.

In Morris Lapidus, the artist uses these two-dimensional grids that expand into three-dimensional forms to highlight existing connections that the location offers. The colours and shapes in the wall painting indicate a tempo that relates social change to the past as well as to the future. Referencing the architect Morris Lapidus, known for his use of display and commercial architecture of the hotel as a vernacular American form, the artwork Morris Lapidus creates a confrontation of commercial, urban and social topologies, placing the consumer right in this field of tension.