Coinciding with Mali Morris: Returning at the Hatton Gallery, Newcastle (14 September - 11 January, 2025), Gallagher & Turner are showing selected works on paper by Mali Morris alongside sculptures by Stephen Lewis.

This will be Morris & Lewis’ fourth show together in their partnership of 40 years. Working from A.P.T Studios, London, overlooking Deptford Creek, there is a conversation at play between the artists that extends beyond their life and studio walls. Recalling Kurt Schwitters’s Merz Barn Wall, which resides alongside Morris’ paintings in the Hatton Gallery, this conversation explores how colour and form can structure space, however in Morris & Lewis’s case, this challenge is constrained to the spatial frame or object.

Morris explains that these works on paper are autonomous paintings, not studies, and relate to some of the larger paintings on canvas that are on show at the Hatton Gallery. The series Edge of a Portrait, 1994, exhibited at the Royal Academy in 2019, was inspired in part by her love of the Profile Portraits of the Italian Renaissance, with their compositions that flow from top to bottom, colour relationships building a luminosity that glows. The paint and spatial field are in no way passive here: these works reveal the active, intimate, and physical relationship a painter has with her medium, as she explores the mysteries of edge and space on a flat surface.

There is confidence, delicacy, and deftness of touch in these paintings. Morris fluently investigates the potential for stillness and movement in works that have a vibrancy and musicality, speaking directly to us in rhythmic line and chords of colour.

Lewis’s work also demonstrates this sense of musicality: “Lewis’s quality as a sculptor lies in his ability to animate the structure and weight of his pieces visually. He makes the sheer stuff of his art dance” (John McLean). His sculptures use flat planes, bars, curved plates and found elements, creating complex internal tensions, and playing with weight and illusion. When colour is used it is an integral part of each work, with chromatic and three-dimensional interactions bringing a formal dynamic and an emotional charge.

Whilst these works have their origins in drawings, showing a disciplined investigation of line and form and how this translates and manifests in steel, they go further than this, showing a hint of figuration and humour. Lewis reinvents familiar forms, from bridges, quarries and shoes to iron-clad warships. His diverse influences, from David Smith, Henri Laurens, and Paul Klee to Hieronymus Bosch and Pieter Bruegel, go some way to explaining his mix of the fantastical and specific.

The works presented show the dedication of Morris & Lewis to their respective disciplines and their enquiry into how colour, form, and light constructs space. As the exhibition title suggests, this is ‘Real Work’.