Ron Morosan: Circular Causality

Westwood Gallery NYC is pleased to present Circular Causality, an exhibition of recent paintings by Ron Morosan, an American artist, writer, educator, and curator whose work explores the fluid territory between image, language, culture, and meaning. In a contemporary culture saturated with visual media, images are frequently distilled into icons capable of conveying clear meanings. Ron Morosan’s art embraces complexity and agency rather than offering clear answers or easy assumptions. Within his paintings, there is no predetermined message to decode, but rather an invitation to participate in the construction of meaning. Morosan understands his artwork as a “mutual dialogue” between artist, artwork, and viewer. It is this circular loop of interpretation — in which connections are continually made, interrupted, and transformed — that serves as an underlying subject for the paintings on view. Over the course of four decades, Morosan has developed a distinctive visual language in which geometric forms, ambiguous figures, and seemingly incongruous cultural references form the strata of a speculative narrative composition. In the age of the algorithm and the attention economy, Morosan continues to work in a medium that is centuries old. Synthesizing archaic form and contemporary imagery, his paintings offer a metaphysical inquiry into how we order, perceive, and make meaning of the world — underscoring the horizontal as a universal structure that has organized visual experience from ancient narrative wall paintings, to printed comic books, to the scrollable digital feeds of today. In his most recent paintings, the artist adapts this discrete horizontal structure into a reconfiguration that is “half landscape and half narrative still life,” combining urban material languages within multiple registers. Across the paintings on view, recurring horizontal bars act as stone-like barriers mediating between the viewer and what is represented, reflecting the world while also framing, dividing, and withholding it. In the larger works such as Instant Recall (2023), these barriers appear to delineate a “chain of events” before ultimately becoming an enigmatic part of the overall speculative narrative. Titles such as Wire-Head Option (2021), Picasso's Ghost (2022), and Transition Horizon (2023) similarly offer clues for interpretation while simultaneously encumbering any straightforward reading of the image. They open pathways into a private system of associations encompassing art history, philosophy, sociology, popular culture, and technology, while leaving the viewer free to determine how, and whether, the various elements connect. Morosan's visual language draws upon a broad constellation of influences, including Duchamp and de Chirico as well as other figures of early Dada and Surrealism. Yet these references are not treated as fixed historical categories. They become active components within an evolving pictorial field where high and popular culture, theory and humor, abstraction and figuration, history and futurity can coexist. Like Lautréamont's famous formulation of “a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table" that came to define the Dadaist use of incongruous juxtapositions to unsettle conventional meanings, Morosan’s paintings are “fortuitous encounters” between unexpected components, commanding our curious reassessment. ABOUT THE ARTIST Ron Morosan was born in Detroit in 1947 and studied painting and Art History at the Center for Creative Studies and Wayne State University, where he received his BFA, before earning MA and MFA degrees in painting and art history from the University of Iowa. He subsequently studied Art History and Museum Practices at the University of Michigan, with support from a National Endowment for the Arts award. Morosan has exhibited internationally, including at the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale, the Circulo de Bellas Artes in Madrid, the Municipal Art Gallery in Athens, the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in Lisbon, and the State Painting and Sculpture Museum in Ankara. His work is held in collections including the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, The Mint Museum, the New Jersey State Museum, the Islip Art Museum, the Lannan Foundation, and the collection of Agnes Gund. Morosan was also included in the New Museum's inaugural exhibition, MEMORY, curated by founder Marcia Tucker, and in PARADISE LOST/PARADISE REGAINED at the American Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1984. He lives and works in New York and is exclusively represented by Westwood Gallery NYC.