Free exhibition of works spanning eight decades by Desmond Morris, the British artist and zoologist, centred on his biomorphic painting 'The Gathering'.
The Redfern Gallery is hosting a retrospective of Desmond Morris from 16 September to 24 October, a show that brings together work from across an eight-decade artistic career. Most of us know Morris as the zoologist and author, but he spent his life painting too, and the two sides of him ran in parallel, both tied to a fascination with behaviour, instinct and the natural world.
His visual language is built on biomorphic forms — those organic, living shapes that feel like they're growing or shifting. He was working with them from the start, and Over the Wall (1946), which he painted when he was eighteen, is one of the earliest examples. The exhibition traces that thread from those first experiments in the 1940s right through to the end of his life, so you can see how he stuck with it for eighty years.
The centrepiece is The Gathering (2004), a monumental multi-panelled work he spent three months on. He described it as both a culmination of his biomorphic world and a homage to Hieronymus Bosch, and it's the kind of piece that anchors the whole show. He continued to paint and write until the end, and this exhibition gathers work from that entire span.
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It coincides with the publication of his final book, The Surrealist Menagerie: Strange Beasts and Fantastic Visions (Thames & Hudson), and the catalogue essay, The Rationale of the Irrational, is by Silvano Levy. The gallery is at 11-12 Pall Mall, SW1Y 5LU, with Piccadilly Circus and Charing Cross as the nearest Tube stations. Entry is free.
