IVAN MORLEY: TRAGEGEDY, [SIC]

David Kordansky Gallery is pleased to announce Tragegedy, [sic], a solo exhibition of new works by Ivan Morley.

March 6 – April 26, 2025

Morley has continued to build on a decades-old typology where form, color, and material layer to create paintings that are as much object as they are rendered image. Each piece is produced by painting an underlayer in watercolor and slowly building onto the canvas with thread, focusing on small, embroidery-ring-sized sections at a time, so that the completed work isn’t revealed to the artist until the end of the embroidery process. Looking therefore becomes secondary to the act of building or constructing an image on a micro scale.

Inspired by the title of a Bee Gees song, Tragegedy, [sic] alludes to the way a musician may elongate or alter the pronunciation of a word to better match the rhythm of a song, and so too can a painter modify an image to better meet the needs of a composition. In this sense, painting, or the creation of a visual image, is flexible in the way a written narrative or other methods of storytelling can’t be. Language and narrative are consistent elements in Morley’s work, whether through the inclusion of letter-like forms such as those present in Tehachepi, [sic] (2024), or by grouping the artworks with serialized titles. Morley continues to develop what he calls a “narrative baggage,” where each work is building onto the last and therefore, the meaning behind each painting gets multiplied over time.

While Morley has a deep understanding of painting as a discipline, he’s able to engage in more rigorous and physical production methods that exist outside of two-dimensional space. By prioritizing seemingly “lower” materials such as thread and reverse glass painting, his paintings enter into conversation with more sculptural and conceptual practices, bridging a gap between the constructed and the depicted.

Throughout the exhibition, Morley’s paintings highlight how an image can hold a story or multiple histories on a single plane, and how those histories are connected to the history of painting as a whole. Like language, the paintings on view are strung together in such a way that it requires multiple works, created over many years, to provide the necessary context.