Sarah Morris Liar 2026

Confronting the viewer with its titular indictment, Liar, Sarah Morris’ silkscreen print, is derived from the artist’s early series of ‘text paintings’, produced between 1995 and 1996 and presented in her inaugural 1996 exhibition with White Cube, ‘One False Move’. In these works, Morris appropriated single words drawn from headlines accompanying profiles of notable public figures in tabloids or newspapers such as The New York Times, redeploying their rhetoric in a utilitarian sans-serif typeface rendered in discordant, highly saturated palettes.

The use of colour in this print, with its vibrant pairing of orange and fuchsia, performs a deft dual manoeuvre, compounding the emotive force of the word while simultaneously cloaking it in the bright and disarming aesthetics of Pop. Beyond visual affinities with the typographic paintings of On Kawara, Ed Ruscha and Barbara Kruger, this calculated tension finds a closer precedent in the disquieting juxtapositions of Andy Warhol’s ‘Death and Disaster’ series (1962–64), in which lurid colour served to mediate serial images of catastrophe lifted from mass media. In its form as an edition, Liar extends this seriality, echoing the mechanisms of reproduction through which newspaper headlines, commercial imagery and current affairs circulate.

Realised in collaboration with the Stuttgart-based screen printing studio Graffiti Siebdruck, Liar expands upon the slick reflective sheen of the original 1996 work, which was achieved through the use of household gloss paint. Complicating these properties in silkscreen, the print edition features a double-varnished finish that yields a reflective contrast between the high-gloss lettering and the softer, semi-matte ground, retaining and evolving the physical seductiveness of the original hand-painted surface.

Although several decades separate the work’s origins from its present realisation, time has done little to diminish the affective power of this single word. In an era increasingly marked by strategic falsehoods on the political stage, the rise of artificial intelligence and the rapid dissemination of misinformation online, the status of truth appears increasingly difficult to locate. Liar issues its accusation openly, declining to identify who, precisely, is its target – and thus enlists the viewer in its complicity.

Originally created in response to the conditions of its moment, Morris’ work nevertheless retains a striking prescience. Liar does more than reflect its time – it speaks with equal force to our present, and gestures with knowing unease towards the future.