The practice of the London-based visual artist Louis Morlæ operates at the intersection between two modes of creativity: that of industrial automation and manufacture, and that of character-driven narrative. The result is work which looks not to a distant and abstracted future, but to the furthest and most tantalising edges of what might be possible within the current moment. Seamlessly integrating video and sculpture, he uses game-engine rendered animation to bring his android-like figures—designed using CAD, and then 3D printed in component parts with PLA plastic, aluminium, steel and SLA resin—to life. His in-depth, multimedia worldbuilding explores our cultural and social engagement with tech, the metaverse, and the digital realm from a perspective on continuing technological advancement that is neither wholly utopian or dystopian. Morlæ’s works share not only a distinctive visual sensibility, but an invented reality, in which identifiably of-the-moment signifiers like Balenciaga trainers brush up against science-fictional, lightly surrealist future technology.
b. 1992, Melbourne, Australia
Lives and works in London
BFA, Manchester School of Art, Manchester
MFA, Royal Academy of Arts, London
Rose Easton, London (forthcoming)
Aut-OOO-Arcadia, Somerset House, London (forthcoming)
Purgatorio, Liste Art Fair, Basel
All Watched Over by Emissaries of Loving Grace, Duarte Sequeira, Braga, Portugal
Press (with Lucas Dupuy), Final Hot Desert, Isle of Sheppey
Machinochrome Dreams, Rose Easton, London
Bubblegum Tung, Asylum Studios, Suffolk
Behold a figure, Serpentine, Soft Opening, London
SL x RE, Silke Lindner, New York
Fight or Flight, Roman Road at The Columbia, London
Grot, Horse Hospital, London
28th December 1980, Asylum Studios, Suffolk
The Keeper’s Prize
The Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK
Internal Exhibitions