Rebecca Morris: #35 at Bortolami, Tribeca

Bortolami presents Rebecca Morris's "#35" at 39 Walker Street in Tribeca from October 30 to December 19, 2026. The title reflects the count: this is her thirty-fifth solo exhibition and her third with the gallery.

Morris was born in Honolulu in 1969 and works in Los Angeles. She is known for combining thin, matte washes of color with shimmering metallic impasto, and for merging disparate patterns and motifs into abstractions that feel both current and strangely outside of time. A recent survey curated by Jamillah James traveled from ICA Los Angeles to MCA Chicago. She has also had solo shows at the Blaffer Art Museum in Houston, the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht and The Renaissance Society in Chicago, and has shown in the Whitney Biennial. Her paintings are in the collections of the Whitney, the Hirshhorn, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Hammer Museum, among others.

The new oil paintings vary widely in how they were made. In some, a brush soaked with paint is dragged over a rough, unsanded gesso ground, or splintered oil stick is pressed into the canvas weave. In others, thick impasto lines are spray-painted to look like molten silver, brass, gold and copper. Some works begin as pours of paint and solvent on canvases laid flat to dry overnight. Others are drop cloth paintings, where splatters and run-off from other works collect on primed canvas on the studio floor, leaving a record of accident and labor.

Several new monochromes commit fully to color field painting. Untitled (#03-26) is Morris's latest try at what she calls an "ultimate red painting": wide swaths of a crimson that leans neither warm nor cool, thinned to stay semi-opaque so the color doubles in intensity where strokes overlap, surrounding cloudlike clusters of diluted pink. Untitled (#08-26) lays a jagged metallic silver line, edged underneath in gold, across an expanse of blue and green. Untitled (#02-26) holds to a single blue-green while shifting saturation to build a disorienting depth. Untitled (#05-26) is drawn in iridescent pink taupe on bare gesso, in a cobblestone arrangement marked by magenta stains.

The most experimental piece, Untitled (#13-26), centers on a cryptic form the artist calls a "mono-claw," which reads as a portal onto stony textures in a neutral palette. At the bottom, a grid of scratchy test marks suggests an index to the painting's own logic. Throughout, Morris builds systems and motifs of her own and returns to them, and she treats taste as a tool: bad taste, in her view, can disrupt where good taste can be banal.

The gallery is open Tuesday to Saturday, 10 AM to 6 PM, and by appointment.