The Mirage [Las Vegas] 1999

Sarah Morris’s ‘The Mirage [Las Vegas]’ is a hard-edged geometric abstraction, a painting that’s all about the push and pull of colour and form. The surface is flat and smooth, like a sign, in which a network of black lines create diamond shapes with different colours such as grey, white, orange, purple, and green. I can imagine Sarah Morris methodically taping off the different sections, carefully applying each colour, and then peeling away the tape to reveal those crisp, clean edges. It’s a slow, deliberate process, one that requires patience and precision. There's something about that act of painting those interlocking shapes that feels architectural to me, like she's building a structure on the canvas, but a wonky one. The title ‘The Mirage’ feels right because the painting looks like both a building, and an optical illusion. Like so many painters, Sarah Morris invites us to see the world in a new way, inspiring us to find beauty and meaning in unexpected places.