January 18–May 4, 2008

 

R O B E R T   M O R R I S   b. Kansas City, Missouri, 1931

Robert Morris's Untitled (1987) is a silkscreen version of an archival photograph taken by a photographer of the British Army's Film and Photographic Unit in the last days of World War II during the liberation of the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp. Untitled is part of a body of work produced by Morris in the 1980s—his Holocaust and Firestorm paintings—in which he reconsiders images from the war. The images are drawn from archival material dealing with the Holocaust and with the firebombing of German cities such as Dresden, Leipzig, and Berlin. Morris's meditation on the mnemonic registers of the war came at a moment when the subject was under reconsideration by historians, artists, and writers. He made some alterations to the original photograph, cropping to the edge of the image so as to fill the frame in a looming, projective fashion. The reproduced image was treated with encaustic, then splashed—with almost expressionistic verve—with a blue-purple selenium tint that gives it the jarring, discordant appearance of an Old Master print. Further interventions include the elaborately carved frame, fabricated from a material called Hydrocal used by Morris in the 1980s in a "baroque" phase in which paintings and drawings were encased in armatures that carry symbolic and allegorical meaning. The frame of Untitled reveals fragments of human body parts and objects, thus suggesting a reliquary and giving the overall work a quasi-religious appearance.

 

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