Exhibition sees Mali Morris 'Returning'
Exhibition sees Mali Morris 'Returning'
More than 60 years after she came to Newcastle as an undergraduate, Mali Morris is back with a career-spanning exhibition. David Whetstone saw it
Many successful artists have been fledged on Newcastle University’s acclaimed fine art course and often they return to the nest, sharing their life’s work at the Hatton Gallery.
The latest to do so is abstract painter Mali Morris with a timely exhibition of vivid canvases to brighten these largely damp and dull autumn days.
On the walls of the Hatton, white as wedding cake with its pillars and cupolas, they are irresistible, their juxtapositions of shape and colour lifting the spirits as you move from room to room.
Stand back and they appear to swirl and dance. Get up close and you can see how paint has often been applied with a single flamboyant brushstroke by an artist seeming to revel in its application.
Some paintings are quite rigidly geometrical; others are explosions of colour. Some are brilliantly opaque; others, with the paint applied lightly, have a shimmering, translucent quality.
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Mali Morris was born in North Wales in 1945 and came to Newcastle to study fine art as an undergraduate in 1963.
It is remembered as a key time because influential artist academics Victor Pasmore and Richard Hamilton were in the process of striving to revolutionise art education with a ‘back to basics’ design course.
It doesn’t appear to have done Mali any harm.
Speaking in November on the BBC Radio 3 programme Private Passions, she said: “It was a very cerebral course and I think perhaps a lot of it went over my head, but it was the kind of teaching which comes back over the years.”
And since Mali has herself been a teacher, you imagine some of its principles must have been passed on.
Newcastle she remembered on the programme as a wonderful city which she fell in love with as soon as she crossed the Tyne. “It was the beginning of adulthood,” she said.
She also recalled seeing Bob Dylan “go electric” at Newcastle City Hall in 1966, just four days after he had prompted a concert-goer in Manchester to cry “Judas” when he first publicly abandoned his acoustic roots.
“It was very wonderfully shocking,” she said, but she has remained a lifelong fan.
A recipient of the prestigious Hatton scholarship at Newcastle, Mali went on to study for a master’s degree at Reading University and then embarked on a career which has seen her presenting more than 40 solo shows in this country and overseas.
She has also exhibited in many group shows, is represented in major collections and in 2010 was elected a member of the Royal Academy.
Two years ago she was commissioned to design 33 banners which hung above London’s Bond Street throughout the summer. You couldn’t say she has been hiding her light under a bushel.
The exhibition, co-curated by Sam Cornish and Zoe Allen, includes about 40 key works – some big, some small – that span the artist’s career, the earliest from the 1970s and the latest very recent, such as Impeller II dating from 2023.
A moody black and white photograph dating from the early 1970s shows Mali at the Laing Art Gallery as winner of a Northern Arts prize.
Clearly she returned for that but her latest visit to the city she remembers so fondly was to attend the opening of this exhibition chronicling a life dedicated to art and painting.
Mali Morris: Returning is at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle University, until January 11, 2025.
Meanwhile Gallagher & Turner, at nearby 30 St Mary’s Place, is showing until November 2 a selection of works on paper by Mali Morris along with sculptures by her husband, Stephen Lewis.
The Hatton Gallery is open Monday to Saturday, 10am to 5pm (admission free); Gallagher & Turner is open Tuesday to Friday, 11am to 5pm, and on Saturday from 11am to 4pm.