Maison Mono, 150 Bayard St, Brooklyn, NY
Featuring: Shuyi Cao, Sophia Heymans, Ina Jang, Nianxin Li, Yujie Li, Miwa Neishi, Edd Ravn, and Craig Taylor
Bio: “a combining form denoting relation to, or connection with, life, vital phenomena, or living organisms.”
Morphology: “the features, collectively, comprised in the form and structure of an organism or any of its parts.”
Derived from the Greek words bios (life) and morphe (form), Biomorphism refers to abstract shapes that evoke the forms of living things like plants, organisms, and the human body. As a movement, it emerged from the fertile roots of Dada and Surrealism in the wake of the Great War and the ensuing cultural cataclysm. Artists of all mediums responded to the breakdown of social, political, and moral order with avant-garde movements that sought to change the definition of art itself. Some found inspiration in the unknowable subconscious while others developed an interest in the physical sciences and the biological structures and systems that create life. All worked intuitively, endeavoring to reveal the truth, however ugly, of their experience and identity in changing times.
At their core, artworks and designs of the Biomorphic movement feel alive. Swelling shapes evoke fleshy organs, cells under a microscope, dystopian flora. These forms are abstracted, uncanny derivations of reality, simultaneously familiar yet perturbingly strange. Many Biomorphic artists experimented with automatism, a Freudian artmaking method involving creating without conscious thought and by drawing material from the unconscious mind, to create dreamscapes of body allusions. Organic abstraction, with all its discomforting visual chimeras, served as an unexpected vehicle to self discovery.
Alfred H. Barr coined the term “biomorphic” in the catalogue for his landmark 1936 exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art “Cubism and Abstract Art”. Writing about postImpressionist giants like Henri Matisse and early Surrealists like Jean Arp and Joan Miró, Barr observed that “there is a current that is intuitional and emotional rather than intellectual; organic or biomorphic rather than geometrical in its forms; curvilinear rather than rectilinear, decorative rather than structural, and romantic rather than classical in its exaltation of the mystical, the spontaneous and the irrational."
bios, morphe explores how elements of historical Biomorphism manifest in contemporary artmaking, continuing to serve as a tool for making sense of oneself, one’s environment, and one’s position in the world. The artists in the exhibition present the familiar as unfamiliar, engage absurdity to critique social issues, juxtapose unexpected imagery, and make human and alive that which is not.
In Nianxin Li’s unsettling portraits, snail-like organisms commune in mysterious settings, their secrets and conspiracies unbeknownst to us. Maintaining an ambiguous balance, the creatures simultaneously rely on and guard against each other, creating an undercurrent of tension exacerbated by the alarming shades of red pervading Li’s canvases. To the artist, her still lifes are unexpected studies of familial relationships, where “feelings of disconnect toward the traditional familial framework” manifest in the subtle, strange relationships between these pulsing, alien figures.
Photographer Ina Jang also invents imagined worlds inhabited by playful, amorphous effigies. To create the colorful pictures from her Radiator Theater series, Jang repurposes leftover pieces of paper from previous projects, cutting and painting them into abstract, organic forms before arranging them in delicate tableaux held up with wires and tacks. Finally, she photographs each “scene” in hand-built, three-dimensional sets using the direct sunlight in her studio. The compositions themselves are geometric yet poetic, drawing an intricate balance between the precision of paper and the elliptical curvature of biomorphic shapes.
Similar forms manifest in Craig Taylor’s meticulously textured paintings, which feature motifs of busts and limbs that emerged from the artist’s Surrealist-inspired automatic approach over 30 years. Taylor’s mark-making and color systems are rooted in an iterative drawing process that continuously distills from his wide-ranging art historical influences, ranging from Manet and Matisse to chiaroscuro woodcuts to the abstract expressionists. The creatures in his paintings, grid-like and cross-hatched, are “at once architectonic, at once corporeal, and at once geological…attached to a person, a living consciousness, and an anthropomorphic form”.
Sophia Heymans’ figure-infused landscapes are “biome-morphic”, transforming features of the land into features of the human body. Heymans’ practice is deeply influenced by her childhood on a family farm in Minnesota, where she grew up playing outdoors with her sister and nurturing a love for the natural world. Each canvas is embedded with natural materials like prairie grass seeds, moss, and mop strings. Ripe with magic and myth, Heymans’ anthropomorphic landscapes are melodic odes to nature, imbuing a spirited, lyrical essence into the lands we all inhabit.
Yujie Li’s dreamy, sea-green abstractions also conjure visions of surreal ecosystems, albeit on a more modest scale, evoking murky ponds where microorganisms dwell and shower heads that gather unwelcome algae. Li is drawn to the fluid yet formidable nature of water, an element that the artist believes can simultaneously kindle introspection and healing but also induce submersion and silence. In When You’re Crying, the artist meditates intimately on pain and vulnerability, drowning wispy organisms in washes of teal melancholia.
Interdisciplinary artist Edd Ravn literally grows microbiomes of bacteria in petri dishes, which serve as additive materials in his artmaking process. The artist swabs microbes from his own sensory organs – ears, mouth, eyes – to cultivate these vibrant worlds before dehydrating and affixing them to his watercolors. The works on paper themselves are transcendental in form yet earthly in material; mesmerizing lines and cryptic shapes evoke metaphysical themes while rainwater and mineral pigments root the compositions in the physical world.
With a kindred interest in biology, Shuyi Cao creates fantastical relics of ecological futures in her sculpture series As they folded in and breached out. Rusted, serpentine stoneware resemble petrified remains of corals, marine invertebrates, barnacles, and other fossilized flora. These boundary-crossing forms “invite pondering over the relationship between these elusive organisms - whether they are symbiotic, mutualistic, parasitic, cancerous; or merely bizarre conglomerates of objectiveless growth.” Cao’s speculative creations exist at the interlocking nodes of networked life forms, fusing seamlessly the divide between the human and the technological.
Finally, ceramicist Miwa Neishi fashions calligraphic vases inspired by the soft arches and swells of ancient Asian written languages in conversation with feminine bodies. Functionality is paramount to Neishi’s sculptures, all of which hold water and can serve as vessels for flowers and other plant life. Meditative in nature, organic in shape, and quietly, irresistibly beautiful, Neishi’s free-formed ceramics encapsulate the harmony and balance of the natural world