REBECCA MORRIS — ROCK PAPER SCISSORS
By Dorothée Perret
There is something exciting about making a choice and having to stick with it. I think that painting is all about this idea of regrouping. How do you incorporate your mistakes or your failures? It is endemic to painting: learning to live with those experiences, or engaging your process to figure out what is working. It is shifting all the time. I love the feeling of potential—of not knowing what I’m going to do, how to solve the problem, how it’s going to turn out.— Rebecca Morris
Rebecca Morris’s exhibition at Regen Projects—#34—suitably marks the thirty-fourth of her career as a painter and her first collaboration with the gallery. For the occasion, she made full use of Regen’s expansive space to display thirteen new and exquisite paintings.
The show has been a success—and Morris is clearly enjoying herself. Like the game of rock-paper-scissors, her work plays with a sense of chance: shapes, colors, and arrangements on the canvas can feel almost randomly chosen. Yet underneath this spontaneity, one can feel a firm sense of virtuosity—hands born of experience and knowledge—that echoes the balance of unpredictability and mastery inherent in the hand game itself.
Morris knows her game well, and each note she plays carries intention. Thirteen paintings speak to one another, suggesting a story that resists being told. Perhaps this is what abstraction offers: a sense of potentiality, even as what we see dissolves almost at first glance. She conjures shapes that can’t be clearly named, and colors that seem to rebel against nature itself. In Untitled (#22-25), she hints at the shape of claws, though the form might equally suggest a Christmas tree. Through her gestures, she opens wings of desire, and like a kid in a candy store imagination grows lush and unbound.
Despite the formality of the grid, a recurring motif which structures many of the canvases, Morris approaches every painting as a singular body. Nowhere in the exhibition is there true repetition—even when two works seem to mirror one another, they resolve into non-identical twins. Consider Untitled (#20-24), where the grid coalesces into a single block, and Untitled (#24-24), where it divides into two distinct sections (see images below). This refusal to repeat, while still producing a coherent and recognizable body of work, is central to Morris’s work. With her, difference always prevails—more vibrant, more strange, more alive.
#34 is more than an art exhibition—it is an amusement park, where each ride delivers its own measure of emotion and delight. There is something for everyone to take away, and anyone can enter and become part of it. Playing with the rules of abstraction, Morris is a weaver of color and line, creating an exuberant and generous place of perpetual enchantment where imagination and form endlessly collide.
REBECCA MORRIS — #34
Through October 25, 2025
Regen Projects
6750 Santa Monica Boulevard, Los Angeles
regenprojects.com/rebecca-morris
REBECCA MORRIS and LIZ LARNER in conversation
Saturday, October 4, 2025, at 11 a.m.
Regen Projects
R.s.v.p.: Conversation
Rebecca Morris quote from Jennifer Samet, “Beer with a Painter: Rebecca Morris,” Hyperallergic, November 14, 2014, © Hyperallergic.
Rebecca Morris, #34, Regen Projects, Los Angeles, September 13–October 25, 2025, from top: exhibition views (3); Untitled (#26-25), 2025; exhibition view; Untitled (#22-25), 2025; Untitled (#20-24), 2024; Untitled (#24-24), 2024; Untitled (#23-25), 2025; Untitled (#20-25), 2025; exhibition view.
Artworks and individual images © Rebecca Morris, courtesy the artist and Regen Projects; installation views courtesy Regen Projects; all photos by Flying Studio.
