The exhibition Chloroplast, organised jointly by the Southampton City Art Gallery and the Kunsthalle Nürnberg, is the first comprehensive one-man show of the young British artist Paul Morrison (born in 1966). The artist's trademark is his preoccupation with a single theme, the representation of nature.

Phyloporphyrin; 1999

In his black and white landscapes and botanical paintings Morrison breathes life into the traditional genre of landscape painting in a skilful and multi-faceted way. The artist consistently quotes forms of representation familiar to us from a variety of different media and varies them in imaginative ways in his compositions.
He not only draws on botanical books for inspiration but also quotes popular commonplace signets from high and low culture, ranging from Walt Disney style cartoons to paradigms from art history. Sometimes memories of fairytale books are rekindled, sometimes motifs hidden by black and white lines have to be deciphered.

Morrison makes inventive use of the classical elements of composition, like perspective and proportion, he literally samples different patterns of perception, confronting the beholder with them directly. Sometimes he zooms individual motifs down to minute proportions behind an abstract mesh, sometimes he places them at almost painful close range directly before the eyes of the beholder.
In his wall paintings, especially, he confronts us with larger-than-life representations of plants, which he reproduces at very close-up range. The serial nature of his paintings is expressed in the uniform black and white that characterises them throughout and the recurrence of individual plant motifs that he presents under a variety of different aspects. It is first and foremost his choice of motifs and the ingenious way he places them in the scene that lends a charm to his landscapes.

Paul Morrison is creating a room of large-format murals especially for the Kunsthalle Nürnberg. An outdoor installation on the occasion of the Blaue Nacht (May 11, 2002) is also on view in the courtyard.

A catalogue to accompany the exhibition is published by Verlag der Buchhandlung Walter König, Cologne with contributions by Simon Wallis (Tate Modern, Liverpool) and Andrea Madesta.

Sponsored by The British Council.

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