blank is pleased to present Notes on a grid, a solo exhibition by Kyle Morland (b.1986, Johannesburg) and his sixth with the gallery.

This exhibition has 11 starting points: 11 sculptures, variously formed in stainless steel, aluminium, and plaster. They act as 11 coordinates or cues. They are prompts, a network of parallels and perpendiculars that render sequence non-linear but in chorus and company. In this way, Kyle Morland’s latest exhibition, Notes on a grid, is a gathering.

The gathering begins outside as Morland collects landmarks, flowers, shapes, conduits, and forms. These objects sit as a sequence of moments in his studio, as a rhetoric for how objects might adhere to one another and assemble to make a larger form.

Morland’s previous works have often been described as a corporeal alphabet, a series of angular, living symbols that can be read in prose, colour, and space. However, in this installation, the legibility is vertical and disarming. Polished sculptures reflect the bulging gaze of viewers, and truncated plaster forms bare their undertones, pinkish-green. Rather than prose, Morland offers cut stems, a collection of  “pick up sticks”, a game, and a dance that tricks the intellectual back to the instinctual. There are no idle hands.

This ordered scattering is, therefore, best read as a score. Like notes on sheet music, at different volumes, the sculptures are an arrangement made to be performed. Morland leaves the choreography of the grid to the gatherers to see what they might do and how they, too, may derive a sequence on non-linear terms through multiple entrances. Mutual interpretation and improvisation exist in the solidarity of material, form, and blocking. And, 11 remains a prime number, divisible by itself or one – in absolute relation and retention.

blank is pleased to present variations on a lofted bend, a solo exhibition by Kyle Morland.

In this, his sixth exhibition with the gallery, Morland leaves behind the expansive linear forms of his earlier sculptures, retaining only their points of intersection. Borrowing techniques and principles from the engineering field, he interrogates in detail those precise moments of transition, or mergence, from one shape into another, bending sheets of metal in an investigation of what are known in technical terms as ‘lofted bends’.

Presented as a series of self-contained, modular units, Morland imagines the exhibition as a ‘library of forms’. In a process of play, the artist activates this library to develop a vocabulary of his sculptural language. As with learning any new language − beginning with single units, sounds or words, to gradually build more complex phrases and ideas − he freely connects the components to create more intricate assemblies, intuitively deciding between combinations of forms to produce the most pleasing compositions. Placed in clusters, the sculptures appear to be manufactured repetitions, but at a closer look, it transpires that they are differentiated through nuanced shifts in how the shapes converge, their subtle variations encoded within the pattern numbers punched into their surfaces.

It is through this pursuit of form that Morland’s sculptures move between various associations. Suggestive of the figure, close-ended tubular forms contort and extend outwards from the centre like truncated limbs. This relation to the body is further emphasised through scale; one is led to walk along and around the curved surfaces of the larger sculptures that are similar to human height. Smaller aluminium sculptures, presented on shelves and a table, tempt the viewer to interact with them: pick them up, hold them and move them around. Constructed from the same materials that make up the sculptures, the shelves on which the sculptures are presented make deliberate reference to the origins of the works and the processes that gave rise to them. This gives an impression of the studio space and with that, the performative logic of how the works were developed.

Morland manages to conceal the making of his large sculptures, through erasing visible seams that once identified the parts as separate. The effect is a gestalt sensation, countered by the laying bare of certain aspects of his systematic process, such as the installation of the single units. Morland’s central focus on transitions continues to play out as his work simultaneously invokes references to industry and the body, fragments and unity, process and play.

Kyle Morland’s (b.1986, Johannesburg) practice engages sculpture and photography as a means of documenting and reimagining functional forms and structures. His continuously growing archive of photographs resonates in his sculptures, as he borrows and stretches industrial forms and materials. Morland often makes his own tools in order to realise his sculptures, creating functionless forms from his studio which is, at times, reminiscent of an industrial workshop. Morland realises his ideas within the context of self-imposed formal constraints —responding to challenges he sets for himself in creating the work.

blank projects is pleased to present a solo exhibition by Kyle Morland, his fifth with the gallery.

In this, his first solo show in blank’s new gallery space, Morland responds to it’s volume with three large sculptural works. Morland, who has a penchant for working within self imposed constraints, embraced the challenge of bringing the works into the space, solved by building them out of segmented elements. Each segment has been meticulously calculated and drawn, cut out of steel plate and bent into shape before being bolted to the next element. Added together, these straight-lined, rhomboid shapes create curved, linear forms resembling the ubiquitous air-conditioning duct, speaking to the artists preoccupation with industrial forms, materials and modes of production. Shot-blasted and painted with white enamel, these sculptures, although large in scale, have a light touch. They curve through the gallery, reaching to the ceiling and playfully articulating the space around them.

In the latter space of the gallery, Morland hints at the processes that gave rise to these works, and new works that developed out of them. Flat templates of mild steel constitute a triptych on one wall, while a series of wall-based sculptures that shift from rectangle to circle are hung on another. Maquettes and studies relating to the larger works complete the installation.

For Morland, it is imperative that he understand the making of the thing from the inside out, investigating every step in the process as he goes. This is the artist-engineer at work – building functionless things in a laborious, time-consuming process that subverts the overwhelmingly automated and profit-driven nature of invention and industry today.

Morland’s most ambitious project to date, the exhibition draws on the knowledge and experience gained from nearly a decade’s practice, combining and refining the processes and formulae applied in previous works. In particular, it is a culmination and continuation of the conceptual and material processes from the last two years.

Working across disciplines in sculpture, photography and video, Kyle Morland’s primary interests lie in forms, the systems that create them, and industrial modes of production. He often sets himself rules, and creates the necessary tools, to realise his ideas which add a set of formal constraints to the creative process and resulting work.

Morland graduated from the University of Cape Town in 2009. He has held seven solo exhibitions to date, most recently Assemble at blank projects (2016). He has participated in several group exhibitions, both locally and internationally, in Now and Then: Kyle Morland / El Loko at Zeits MOCCA (2017), Off the Wall: An 80th Celebration with Linda Givon at WITS Art Museum (2016) and Flag New York City as part of Performa 13 in New York (2013). Currently, Morland is an artist-in-residence at the A4 Arts Foundation in Cape Town as part of the exhibition Parallel Play.


Morland lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa.

blank projects is pleased to present Assemble, an exhibition of new sculptures by Kyle Morland.

This, Morland’s fourth solo show at the gallery, breaks away from the artist’s rigorous self-imposed rules and formulas and explores new processes and materials. Aluminium, copper, rubber and fabric are juxtaposed in loose and playful assemblages influenced by Morland’s preoccupation with industrial mechanised processes, in combination with his own methods of production.

Through these approaches, and with an emphasis on colour and texture, remnants of older works give rise to new and altered forms. The result is a series of sculptures that, while referencing the parameters and systems that guided earlier work, are at the same time liberated from those constraints and articulate a new artistic strategy for Morland.

If you have a body of work that is developing, then work comes out of work, onionskin by onionskin.
– Richard Serra, 1993


Inspired by Richard Serra’s sentiments,  ‘Node’ marks the next step in the ongoing development of Kyle Morland’s studio practice as a complex network of interrelated ideas which serve to generate new works. Over time, Morland has fostered a series of self-imposed guidelines (increasingly sophisticated and concise) which suggest the directions and form of new sculptures. These include titling conventions which describe the specific history of a work’s construction, colour signifiers conveying information about the materials used and self-fashioned bending tools to facilitate the realisation of the artist’s ideas.

There is a kind of structuralist philosophy to Morland’s view of the studio, one which incorporates as icons everything from jigs, bending machines, off-cuts, joints, support structures for previous works and found studio objects. ‘Node’ in this sense refers to the interconnectedness of these structures within an evolving overarching system. The term can also refer to “knot”, both as a noun (a knot) and a verb (to knot). This is pertinent in relation to the entangled steel forms of works such as 175/8 3.4 5.3 (2014) and 120/6 2.5 3.2 (2014). While the final sculptures appear seamless with no apparent start or end point, Morland’s datasheets assert their underlying composition of discrete angled lengths of steel.

‘Node’ incorporates two large steel sculptures, a series of works on rock paper and a wall-mounted steel profile. It is Kyle Morland’s third solo exhibition with blank projects.

Kyle Morland (b.1986, Johannesburg, South Africa) lives and works in Cape Town. He graduated from the University of Cape Town’s Michaelis School of Fine Art in 2009. He has taken part in multiple group exhibitions, including ‘Flag New York City’, curated by Randi Grov Berger as part of Performa 13, and ‘Thinking, Feeling, Head, Heart’ at the New Church Museum, Cape Town. His first solo exhibition at blank projects, ‘FALSEWORK’, was held in 2011, followed by ‘New Sculptures’ in 2013 and ‘Node’ in 2015. In 2012 Morland was also selected as one of Wanted Magazine’s 10 Young African Artists.


by Tim Leibbrandt



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Seidener, D. 1993. ‘Richard Serra’ in BOMB 42 (Winter 1993)

Working with common mild steel, Kyle Morland created a new body of sculptures through mechanical deformation. Morland often creates the tools necessary to realise his ideas, and in this series he made a forming tool to bend specific widths of steel. This tool, while allowing easier metal formation, added a set of formal constraint to the creative process. These smaller free-standing works are made from the same length of steel with conjoined ends and twists turning them into single sided, single boundary objects. A second series of steel wall reliefs are painted in bright industry standard colours (indicative of the metal width profiles) on the wall-facing side, creating a subtle reflection of colour around each work. A large-scale free-standing steel sculpture completes the body of work.

Morland's sculptures exploit self-imposed creative constraints in an intuitive way that confirms his interest in Modernist Abstraction and the subtleties of implied space, physical and visual tension and absence.

Working with common mild steel, Kyle Morland created a new body of sculptures through mechanical deformation. Morland often creates the tools necessary to realise his ideas, and in this series he made a forming tool to bend specific widths of steel. This tool, while allowing easier metal formation, added a set of formal constraint to the creative process. These smaller free-standing works are made from the same length of steel with conjoined ends and twists turning them into single sided, single boundary objects,
A second series of steel wall reliefs, are painted in bright industry standard colours (indicative of the metal width profiles) on the wall-facing side, creating a subtle reflection of colour around each work.

A third large-scale free-standing steel sculpture completes the bod of work. Morland's sculptures exploit self-imposed creative
constraints in an intuitive way that confirms his interest in Modernist Abstraction and the subtleties of implied space, physical and visual tension and absence.