Sarah Morris’s cities have no recognisable skylines. They are systems. Grids, segments, glossy planes and sharp colours construct surfaces that appear cool, almost impersonal, yet speak of power, finance and media culture. The new exhibition at White Cube Mason’s Yard confirms the consistency of a practice that for more than three decades has moved between painting and film to interrogate the form of globalisation. Sarah Morris approaches abstraction as if it were an architectural language. Her paintings, executed in high-gloss industrial paint, do not depict buildings but absorb their logic. Each canvas reads like a diagram: fragments locking together like glass façades, panels and screens. The effect is that of a mental map in which the city is reduced to structure, to code. Alongside the paintings, the films introduce a narrative dimension that is never purely documentary. The camera moves through offices, streets and interiors, capturing details that escape a distracted gaze. There is no explicit commentary, but an editing rhythm that suggests connections between finance, spectacle, administration and culture. The images do not accuse; they reveal how a system operates. The exhibition title hints at a tension between the wild and the vertical, between what resists control and what is organised by economic logic. In the paintings this tension translates into an unstable balance between order and fragmentation. The surfaces are immaculate, yet the compositions offer no centre. The viewer’s eye is compelled to move, searching for a structure that continually withdraws. Far from expressionism or gesture, Morris constructs an abstraction that is not an escape but an analysis. Her canvases function as reading devices for contemporary metropolises, where the identity of place dissolves into transnational networks.
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