Desmond Morris (1928-2026)

 

Artist, zoologist and author, Morris occupied a unique position within British Surrealism. His artistic and scientific lives developed in parallel, united by an enduring fascination with behaviour, instinct and the forms of the natural world. From his earliest experiments in the 1940s, Morris developed a distinctive visual language populated by biomorphic forms: strange, mutable creatures inhabiting imagined landscapes.

 

The origins of this private world can be traced to Over the Wall (1946), painted when Morris was eighteen. As Silvano Levy, author and academic specialising in the Surrealist movement, writes in The Rationale of the Irrational, it was with this work that Morris first entered a “private fantasy world”, beginning an exploration of biomorphic imagery that would recur, evolve and transform throughout his life.

 

Central to the exhibition is The Gathering (2004), Morris’s monumental multi-panelled magnum opus. Created over three months, the work gathers together figures and motifs drawn from across his oeuvre within five painted surfaces. Levy describes how Morris conceived the work both as a culmination of his biomorphic world and in homage to Hieronymus Bosch, whose altarpieces he had long admired. With figures from earlier paintings reappearing alongside newly imagined forms, The Gathering becomes, in Levy’s words, “a grandiose and cacophonous orchestration of the emotions.”

 

Morris continued to paint and write until the final days of his life. His final book, The Surrealist Menagerie: Strange Beasts and Fantastic Visions, provides a particularly fitting counterpart to the exhibition. Turning his attention to the strange beasts and fantastic creatures that populate Surrealist art, Morris considers a subject closely connected to his own lifelong creation of imagined organisms and biomorphic worlds.

 

The exhibition and publication together offer an opportunity to reflect upon the remarkable breadth of Morris’s creative life and his enduring commitment to Surrealism. Moving between zoological observation and private fantasy, the rational and irrational, Morris built a world entirely his own — one which, until the end, remained a source of continual invention.

 

Read more about the evolution of Desmond Morris's practice and the development of his remarkable oeuvre in the accompanying catalogue essay, The Rationale of the Irrational, by Silvano Levy. 

 

Preview a selection of works from the exhibition below.