Bockley Gallery

About the Presentation
Bockley Gallery will present work by George Morrison in a solo presentation at Independent 20th Century. This presentation follows his recent re-introductions to national and global audiences through the solo exhibition The Magical City: George Morrison’s New York at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2025–2026); a United States Postal Service Forever Stamp series commemorating his works (2022); and increasing curatorial and academic recognition for his work and influence as evidenced by publications and exhibitions too numerous to list. 

Morrison’s life work spans varying scales of painting, drawing, printmaking, and sculpture, from his first years in New York with the Art Students League and celebrated emergent Abstract Expressionists to his Minnesota homecoming and horizons of Lake Superior and beyond. Rather than adhering to linear narrative time, an anachronic presentation will highlight singular works to honor Morrison’s presence therein, and to allow multiple connections within and between works to arise. In the artist Kay WalkingStick’s words, “Like psychic fingerprints, the record of Morrison’s hand on the surface is best understood as a series of unrehearsed, autobiographical gestures that say, in effect, this is what it felt like to be me at that moment.” 

As a studio-based artist who embraced principles of surrealist abstraction, Morrison’s appreciation of ambiguity took multiple expressions. Working from one place of significance at any given time, most of his works are a composite of multiple encounters with that place, or embodied multiple places. While Lake Superior may be cited, he often referred to feelings and memories associated with the horizon of home via horizons of his experiences with the Atlantic Ocean or the Mediterranean Sea, for example. For much of his career, Morrison responded to natural phenomena of skies, waters, and lands— in relation to each other, to wind, to light, to memory, and more, as they passed through his being. 

About the Gallery
Bockley Gallery is a contemporary art venue and curatorial practice based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Since its founding in 1984, the gallery has worked with artists living and working in Minnesota and the Great Lakes region, which led to a focus with Indigenous artists across Turtle Island/North America. While the gallery offers an intimate experience through a calendar of on-site programming, its broad collaborations expand the dialogue around what it celebrates as the most relevant ideas in art today. Gallery artists’ recent highlighted institutional solo exhibitions across Turtle Island include at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Hammer Museum, ICA Miami, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Hessel Museum of Art, Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, and Remai Modern while recent group presentations include Sydney Biennale, SITE Santa Fe, National Portrait Gallery, Toronto Biennial of Art, Whitney Biennial, and Prospect 5 Triennial. Gallery artists are regularly honored through significant recognition including the Guggenheim Fellowship, Creative Capital Award, MacArthur Fellowship, Baloise Art Prize, Aperture Next Step Award, and many more. The gallery regularly places works in leading private and public collections such as the Walker Art Center, Whitney Museum of American Art, Metropolitan Museum of American Art, Forge Project Collection, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Singapore Art Museum. Having celebrated 40 years in 2024, Bockley Gallery recently launched a dynamic new website including an online publishing platform to center essays and voices of artists in conversation.