SKIN

Curatorial+Co is delighted to present Skin, the third solo exhibition by Morgan Stokes with the gallery. The show presents an array of paintings and sculptures Stokes has created over the past year.

Stokes’s practice explores and reinterprets the medium of painting and, more recently, sculpture. His conceptual approach dissects painting into its discrete elements, such as linen, paint and stretcher bars, to enquire into what makes a painting in the digital age. By creating formal studies into material, Stokes’s works explore what he calls the ‘virtual gaze’, that is, how our mode of perception is shifting as our lives are increasingly mediated by the screen.

For his latest show, Stokes interprets painting as a metaphor for personhood and subsequently surface as a metaphor for skin. Skin is a primal response to material; rabbit skin glue, rock dust and raw linen sit beside worked fabric and metal, a conversation between matter both pre-historic and futuristic. The works are both introspective and reflective, Stokes’s post-minimal sensibility and meditative process evident with the gentle working of each surface. Skin recalls the origins of art, the nature of creation, and the role of material in an increasingly material-free culture.