“Part of expanding my abstract language, my repertoire, was this problem that comes up of ‘this shape looks like that.’ And so it just became pretty dishonest to keep out representation after a while.”

Mark Grotjahn asks Ivan Morley about the evolution of his thread on canvas paintings. Morley discusses how glyphs–shapes in his compositions which resemble real images and objects–led him to incorporate representation into his repertoire of abstraction. This includes Morley’s newest work, Selfie (2020), the artist’s first self-portrait.