Fosun Foundation is delighted to announce Hope From a Thin Line, a solo exhibition of works by Annie Morris, in Shanghai. The artist’s first museum survey show in China will feature sculptures, tapestries, and paintings dating back to 2012, offering an extensive overview of Morris’s vivid, lyrical work. The exhibition will also include a site-specific, gallery-spanning mural on which drawings and tapestries are installed, creating a dynamic formal dialogue that evokes notions of ephemerality and the metaphorical afterlife. 

Using different media, Morris interweaves explorations of personal experience with those of line, surface, and volume. The resulting works are characterized by intense colour, feminine forms, and a palpable precariousness. A remarkable installation from Morris’s Stacks series (2018–2024) will be assembled, including the tallest pigment sculpture the artist has completed to date, at a monumental five and a half metres tall. In these totemic compositions, irregularly shaped spheres of myriad colours—lavender, oxblood red, ochre, viridian—appear to balance atop each other, seemingly suspended in a moment before collapse. This work traces its origins to 2012, while the artist was grieving a stillbirth and began collaging ovular shapes that referenced both eggs and her pregnant belly. She began to carve the forms from foam and plaster and arrange them on a steel armature, literally holding them aloft. Each Stack is thus an enduring monument to a life lost.

For Morris, repetition is a central compositional and processual strategy. Often, she repeats a form or idea until it transforms into something concentrated and abstract. Across the tapestries and paintings on view at Fosun Foundation is the recurring motif of the Flower Woman. A woman with the head of a flower, the figure represents a hybrid portrait of the artist, her fragile fleeting petals recalling the transience of beauty. Eschewing facial expression, the Flower Woman conveys emotion through Morris’s kinetic, impulsive linework. Morris’s tapestries begin with automatic drawings that she translates onto canvas with thread. Employing various signature stitching techniques, she creates the surprising effect of painted, pastel, and charcoal marks in thread. In this way, she uses a labour-intensive, meticulous technical process to generate expressive, spontaneous compositions that she refers to as thread paintings.

Her signature Flower Woman also appears in two human-scaled steel figures from 2018 and 2023, alongside a third, from 2023, that features a reptilian head. Each of these fantastical figures, in ultramarine blue, turquoise, and cadmium red, is articulated in the same impassioned line Morris achieves in her drawings. Such illusions commingle with primordial and astral forms in the site-specific mural Morris has created for Fosun Foundation, installed on the museum’s third floor. Here, in scenes that are at once restless and contemplative, Morris offers an immersive view into her subconscious.