For his solo exhibition at LNM, Anthony Morton presents Endless Painting, a series of oil paintings in both intimate and large formats. These paintings invite many associations; there is a sensation of space here, though these spaces are not immediately recognizable. They are continually unsettled by elements that are unexpected and unknown.

The starting points in his process are quick, intuitive sketches on paper, which are then translated to canvas, worked, and reworked. Some paintings are produced over years: layers added, scratched into, poured on, scraped away. In the painting The Prison of Dreams, the golden yellow light over a black-red horizon might evoke twilight over a dark sea. A jittery scrape of baby-blue disrupts this idea of landscape. The image is further complicated by the underpainting in black and red, peeking out from beneath this blue. New spaces are added—and are revealed.

In The Perceptual Immanence of a Revelation That Never Comes, we move into a space with the same golden yellows, reds and black greens, this time used to a different effect. Here, there is less of a sense of a wide-open landscape and distance. Instead, the scale of the painting envelops the body and threatens to entangle the viewer in the density of Morton’s brushstrokes. In the nearly monochrome painting The Incredulous Stare, the brushwork is rhythmic, creating organic volumes in dark blue. Is it nighttime in the belly of a beast? Are we in a deep-sea cave lined with crumpled blue velvet? Through the painting, these spaces begin to unfold.

For Morton, the goal is to push a painting towards something he does not recognize, something he could not have conceived of from the outset. Once, a bit tongue-in-cheek, he described himself as a landscape painter. But he is not depicting a pre-existing world, so much as he is allowing one to emerge. What unfolds on the canvas is not representation but formation.

Anthony Charles Morton (b. 1992, Durban, South Africa) is an artist based in Bergen, Norway. Morton studied in Japan, Norway, and South Africa, and holds an MA in Fine Art (2019), specialising in painting, and an MA in Philosophy (2023), with research focused on artistic progress in image-making, both from the University of Bergen. Morton has exhibited in Italy, China, Norway, and South Africa, and his work is held in several private and public collections, including Ooh La Art (China), Nandos (Malaysia), and Spier (South Africa). He led the artistic research project “The Place of Shade,” which was recently published in the Nordic Journal of Artistic Research (VIS #11), and directed the film “At the Shore of the Real” which is set to premiere in October 2026.

View a PDF presentasjon of Anthony Morton's "Endless Painting" here