I know some painters that use green. They’re all cowards.: Ivo Morrison

‘I couldn’t tell you anything about anything with any confidence except a little bit of what it feels like to be me.’ – Ivo Morrison

There are two types of painter: those that look out the window and those that look in the mirror. Ivo Morrison is definitely one of the latter.

Based in London, Ivo spends most of his time trying - sometimes failing - to make girls smile. He grips his audience with his reflections on his adventures with all the women who remind him why he likes being alive. This body of work is far from a fairytale love story. It is a humorous insight into the emotions one really feels throughout a relationship. Titles of works include: Toxic Masculinity in the Workplace, I Never Got her Flowers, and What? Feeling Trapped in a Relationship? Me?

Ivo Morrison’s art has a graphic elegance and immediacy. He works with calligraphic inks to compose images of suggestive power, drawing on traditions as diverse as Fifties movie posters, Manga, Otto Dix, Joan Miró, and Babar the Elephant.

‘I just want to tell stories, and I see painting as an interesting way of doing it. They’re always about whatever I’m thinking about: things and mostly relation- ships because they’re the most interesting bits of my, and I guess everyone’s, life. Girls are the best bit and the bit that gives it all its magic, so I paint about girls and all the glorious complicated wonderful things they make me think.’

This is Ivo Morrison’s second solo exhibition at the Rebecca Hossack Art Gallery. The exhibition is exciting, silly and a bit mysterious, because being Ivo Morrison in 2019 is all of those things.