Ribbons of time, 2025
FREYA DOUGLAS-MORRIS
Lehmann Maupin
Freya Douglas-Morris spends most of her time in the studio trying to forget. When she arrives each day at her East London space, she puts on the radio, deletes social media off her phone, and filters out the obligations of daily life. What emerges from this productive erasure are the dreamy, luminous landscape paintings that have garnered so much attention over the past 10 years. “When I come into the studio, I am as much trying to forget as I am to remember,” she explained. “In fact, I probably am trying to forget more than remember.”
Douglas-Morris’s exhibition “My time here is brief,” which inaugurates Lehmann Maupin’s new London gallery space, presents a dozen oil paintings of various sizes from the past 12 months, including the artist’s largest canvas to date. The variation in scale is deliberate. Douglas-Morris has thought carefully about how a viewer will move through the show: how a large canvas creates a sense of peripheral immersion, while a smaller work pulls you into something more intimate. It’s an important sign of her rising profile. Her 2023 solo debut with Alexander Berggruen in New York brought wider attention, and spring 2027 will bring concurrent shows with both galleries in New York.
We went on a walk to celebrate, the land stretched on unending, 2026
Freya Douglas-Morris
Lehmann Maupin
Inspired by nature
Her works have the softness of something half-remembered, or perhaps half-forgotten. Though often based on recollections of Douglas-Morris’s walks in nature, the paintings of rolling hills, open vistas, placid lakes, and solitary trees don’t depict specific places or memories. They prioritize internal feeling over geography and are more interested in communal experience of nature than any personal response.
Over the past decade, Douglas-Morris’s practice has evolved from working with photographs to internalized imagery. After graduating from the Royal College of Art in 2013, she spent years refining her approach—including during lockdown, when she painted from a home studio while raising two young children. “It was harder to do the forgetting then,” she recalled. Now her studio is hers alone, a room in a block of artist studios. She keeps formulaic hours: Monday to Friday until she leaves to pick up her children, and no one interrupts her, making it easier to filter out the obligations of daily life.
A new approach to landscapes
The title “My time here is brief” suggests her continued interest in ephemerality: the brevity of human life compared to geological time and nature’s fleeting cycles. The painting Rush of autumn (2026) captures the drama of the season’s changing leaves while Almost morning (2025) depicts the subtler shifts of light in the early hours. Though figures, once a focus of her practice, have disappeared (for now at least), Douglas-Morris doesn’t consider her painted landscapes empty. Human presence is still referenced in titles, such as We went on a walk to celebrate, the land stretched on unending (2025), which hint at context and stories beyond the frame.
“I think landscape is a total narrative,” she said. “It’s just a narrative that doesn’t have the figures in it right in front of you. There are so many histories, so many things that have happened in those places, things that will happen, things that are bigger than you and wider than you.” Although she lives in London, Douglas-Morris finds nature close at hand. She is based in Clapton, five minutes from Hackney Marshes, a green area with elements of wilderness as well as abandoned industrial leftovers from the 20th century.
She often walks along the River Lea, where she cherry-picks elements to include in her paintings, such as weeds and bulrushes. She also has a small garden, and finds herself moved by the grass coming back every year. “I feel grateful to live in a country that has seasons,” she said. “There’s a real beauty in the seasons because of the sense of time passing they give you.”
A surprising use of color
Much of the emotional effect of her work comes from color. Douglas-Morris chooses tones that are unexpected for natural landscapes—aubergine, celadon, tangerine, lavender—and pairs them in combinations that are both surprising and harmonious. Drawing inspiration from the Fauvists, Helen Frankenthaler, and Mark Rothko, she prioritizes emotional resonance over naturalism. “My paintings are more about color than anything else,” she explained. “I could paint the exact same image 10 times in different colors and it would be an entirely different painting. It is so much more about the feeling. The description is secondary.”
Though her purple skies and luminous moons could feel “almost sugary,” as she put it, she deliberately introduces elements that create tension—dark looming forms that could be rock, cloud, or approaching night; ambiguous weather that might be rain or snow. Douglas-Morris is after an element of surprise, something that makes a viewer pause. She likes conveying this sense of her landscapes as living, shifting places, rather than unchanging vistas.
“I would love the paintings to feel like something more could happen in them. The rain might pass, or someone might walk through, or the moon might set.” By refusing to fix her landscapes in memory or place, Douglas-Morris invites viewers to bring themselves into the painting. It’s a fitting posture for an artist who sees landscape as inherently communal.
from Artsy News https://ift.tt/kmPzj6e
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