Red Rock Variation: Surrealist Landscape

A member of the Anishinaabe people of the Grand Portage Reservation, George Morrison was active in the New York School of Abstract Expressionism, a mid-20th-century movement of avant-garde artists who saw abstraction as the essential vehicle for conveying intense emotion and exploring the unconscious through color, form, space, and gesture. Though his work is largely non-representational, Morrison relied on observations and memories of nature for inspiration and subject matter. The present drawing is part of his extended series of “Surrealist landscapes, ” dreamlike depictions of land and sky that resulted from automatic drawing techniques he adopted as a way to tap into the mind’s subconscious. As here, these abstracted landscapes featured high horizon lines and a flattened perspectives, a signature motif that embodied Morrison’s spiritual and symbolic methodology.