Desmond Morris (British, b.1928)

Desmond Morris (British, b.1928)
Imaginary Saboteur
signed with initials and dated 'DM 02' (lower left)
mixed media and collage
29.2 x 21.5 cm. (11 1/2 x 8 1/5 in.)

Exhibited
London, Redfern Gallery, Desmond Morris: Works on Paper 1948-2018, 16 May-9 Jun 2018

Literature
Desmond Morris, Wordworks, 2020, Dark Window Press, Colwyn Bay, p.164 (col.ill.)

"In 2002 I was exploring the attic above my Oxford studio when, at the very back of an old, built-in cupboard, I noticed a wadge of paper. I extracted it with difficulty and discovered that it was a neatly hand-written legal document dating from Victorian times. The building that had been extended to create my large studio had once been a coach-house and the cupboard in question was inside what would have been the Victorian coachman’s bedroom. The document was a land transfer deed that had been hidden there for safe keeping and had long since been forgotten. It was now of no legal value and, as it had many faded pages, I decided to cut it up and use it as the basis for a series of collages, making the shaped pages into the bodies of a series of biomorphic figures. When cutting these figures, I turned the document on its side, so that it would be difficult to read the words, as these were meant to to be seen as patterning, rather than as analysed script. In this respect, I was using the words as a decorative element in the collages, in the same manner as Picasso had done in the early years of the 20th century, when he glued sections of newspapers into his collage compositions. I made a suite of 11 of these collages, all 11.5 x 8 inches in size."

(Essay on Collages with Words, 2002, by Desmond Morris)

We are grateful to the artist for his assistance in cataloguing the present lot