‘Switch Track’ is a survey show of selected works from 1995 – 2025. This period represents 30 years of painting since Victoria Morton graduated from the MFA course at The Glasgow School of Art in 1995. The exhibition carefully draws upon sketchbook materials, paintings and mixed media works from different points in time.
Morton’s practice has encompassed painting, sculptural assemblages, photography, and sound. Her paintings vary in scale, opacity, colour and spatiality. Each distinctly painted composition has been developed with a degree of intricacy and intuition, exploring a continuously unfolding visual, spatial and psychological experience. She tends to install across a given space to orchestrate a ‘situation’ with the work, creating a journey or exploration for the viewer.
Painting culture is at the centre of what she does, or conversely, she is centred in the collective and evolving human practice of painting. Her process includes research into both the medium or art form itself and its broader cultural contexts and content. The psychology of her work emerges from, and directs, her diverse engagement with materiality, technique, opticality, intuition, narrative, memory, iconography and abstraction. Also key are photography, music, the body, and the idea of thinking-painting – paintings as thinking objects.
Destabilising the idea of linear narrative has been central to the development of her language. She evolves across canvases, an ongoing, unstable, open type of composition with several different possible resolutions that play with the idea of a narrative of sensations. Questioning and destabilising traditional cultural expectations would be at least as important as referencing and celebrating them. An important dimension of her practice is an investment in the history of women in art, though she does not explicitly ‘thematise’ this. With painting at the core of her practice, Morton’s work also considers expanded painting, both in sculpture and sound.
The exhibition takes place at The Glasgow School of Art’s Reid Gallery from 27th June till the 9th August. An Exhibition Preview takes place 5pm – 7pm Thursday 26th June and is free entry but ticketed. Please apply through Eventbrite for access.
For any further information please contact press@gsa.ac.uk
Editors Notes
Victoria Morton (b. 1971, Glasgow) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland, and Fossombrone, Italy. The duality of working in the post-industrial city of Glasgow and rural Italy has become an essential part of how Morton thinks and works. Morton studied at the Glasgow School of Art, receiving her MFA in 1995 and her BA in 1993.
Morton was commissioned by the Royal College of Music, London, in 2019 to create the sculptural artwork ‘Antiphonic Waves’, which hangs in the college’s atrium space. She has exhibited widely, selected solo exhibitions include: ‘Vetrina’, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco (2024); ‘Double Shuffle’ (with Merlin James), Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2023); ‘A Warm Articulation’, Nino Mier, Los Angeles (2023); ‘SLEEP LINE’, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2021); ‘Pedal Point’, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021); ‘Treat Fever with Fever’, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2019); ‘My Mother Was A Reeler’, Etro, London (2016); ‘Spoken Yeahs From A Distance’, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2016);‘Mouth Wave’ Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo (2014); Il Capricorno, Venice (2012); ‘Tapestry (RADIO ON)’, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2012); ‘Her Guitars’, The Modern Institute, Osborne Street, Glasgow (2011); Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2010); ‘Sun By Ear’ (with Katy Dove), Tramway, Glasgow (2007); and ‘Plus and Minus’, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2002).
Selected group exhibitions include: ‘Surface Work’, Victoria Miro, London (2018); ‘GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland’, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2014); ‘A Picture Show’, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2013); ‘Studio 58: Women Artists in Glasgow Since WWII’, Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (2012); ‘Painting Not Painting’, Tate St. Ives, Cornwall (2003); ‘Edge of the Real’, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2004); and S.M.A.K., Ghent (2001).
Victoria Morton is represented by The Modern Institute and Sadie Coles HQ. The Modern Institute was founded in Glasgow in 1997. The gallery works with 58 internationally established and emerging artists, including Martin Boyce, Anne Collier, Urs Fischer, Luke Fowler, Jim Lambie, Victoria Morton, Nicolas Party, Simon Starling, Alberta Whittle, Cathy Wilkes and Richard Wright. The Modern Institute hosts a yearly programme across its two spaces in Glasgow and publishes a variety of artists’ books and monographs. The gallery also curates both public and private shows worldwide, as well as participating in major art fairs.
Sadie Coles HQ is a London-based contemporary art gallery representing over fifty established and emerging international artists. The gallery opened in London in 1997. Since its inception, Sadie Coles HQ has operated from a variety of spaces, mounting numerous off-site projects and partaking in collaborative exchanges throughout London and abroad.
About The Glasgow School of Art (GSA)
The Glasgow School of Art (GSA) is internationally recognised as one of Europe’s leading independent university-level institutions for education and research in the visual creative disciplines. Our studio-based, specialist, practice-led teaching, learning and research draw talented individuals with a shared passion for visual culture and creative production from all over the world. Originally founded in 1845 as one of the first Government Schools of Design, the School’s history can be traced back to 1753 and the establishment of the Foulis Academy delivering a European-style art education. Today, the GSA is an international community of over 3500 students and staff across architecture, design, fine art, innovation and technology in our campuses in Glasgow and Altyre (in the Scottish Highlands) and a thriving Open Studio programme delivering non-degree provision to over 1500 students annually.
