Victoria Morton – Switch Track

Victoria Morton – Switch Track
27 June – 9 August 2025
Reid Gallery

Exhibition Preview
5pm – 7pm Thursday 26th June 2025
Free but ticketed – Book via Eventbrite

Switch Track is a survey show of selected works from 1995 – 2025. This period represents 30 years of painting since Victoria Morton graduated from the MFA course at The Glasgow School of Art in 1995. The exhibition carefully draws upon sketchbook materials, paintings and mixed media works from different points in time.  

Morton’s practice has encompassed painting, sculptural assemblages, photography, and sound. Her paintings vary in scale, opacity, colour and spatiality. Each distinctly painted composition has been developed with a degree of intricacy and intuition, exploring a continuously unfolding visual, spatial and psychological experience. She tends to install across a given space to orchestrate a ‘situation’ with the work, creating a journey or exploration for the viewer.  

Painting culture is at the centre of what she does, or conversely, she is centred in the collective and evolving human practice of painting. Her process includes research into both the medium or art form itself and its broader cultural contexts and content. The psychology of her work emerges from, and directs, her diverse engagement with materiality, technique, opticality, intuition, narrative, memory, iconography and abstraction. Also key are photography, music, the body, and the idea of thinking-painting – paintings as thinking objects.  

Destabilising the idea of linear narrative has been central to the development of her language. She evolves across canvases, an ongoing, unstable, open type of composition with several different possible resolutions that play with the idea of a narrative of sensations. Questioning and destabilising traditional cultural expectations would be at least as important as referencing and celebrating them. An important dimension of her practice is an investment in the history of women in art, though she does not explicitly ‘thematise’ this. With painting at the core of her practice, Morton’s work also considers expanded painting, both in sculpture and sound. 

Victoria Morton (b. 1971, Glasgow) lives and works in Glasgow, Scotland and Fossombrone, Italy. The duality of working in the post-industrial city of Glasgow and rural Italy has become an essential part of how Morton thinks and works. Morton studied at the Glasgow School of Art, receiving her MFA in 1995 and her BA in 1993. 

Morton was commissioned by the Royal College of Music, London in 2019 to create the sculptural artwork ‘Antiphonic Waves’, which hangs in the college’s atrium space. She has exhibited widely, selected solo exhibitions include: ‘Vetrina’, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco (2024); ‘Double Shuffle’ (with Merlin James), Kerlin Gallery, Dublin (2023); ‘A Warm Articulation’, Nino Mier, Los Angeles (2023); ‘SLEEP LINE’, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2021); ‘Pedal Point’, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2021); ‘Treat Fever with Fever’, The Modern Institute, Glasgow (2019); ‘My Mother Was A Reeler’, Etro, London (2016); ‘Spoken Yeahs From A Distance’, Sadie Coles HQ, London (2016);‘Mouth Wave’ Rat Hole Gallery, Tokyo (2014); Il Capricorno, Venice (2012); ‘Tapestry (RADIO ON)’, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2012); ‘Her Guitars’, The Modern Institute, Osborne Street, Glasgow (2011); Inverleith House, Edinburgh (2010); ‘Sun By Ear’ (with Katy Dove), Tramway, Glasgow (2007); and ‘Plus and Minus’, Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (2002). 

Selected group exhibitions include: ‘Surface Work’, Victoria Miro, London (2018); ‘GENERATION: 25 Years of Contemporary Art in Scotland’, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2014); ‘A Picture Show’, Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2013); ‘Studio 58: Women Artists in Glasgow Since WWII’, Mackintosh Museum, Glasgow School of Art, Glasgow (2012); ‘Painting Not Painting’, Tate St. Ives, Cornwall (2003); ‘Edge of the Real’, Whitechapel Gallery, London (2004); and S.M.A.K., Ghent (2001). 

Access

Access to the exhibition is through the main entrance of the Reid Building, which has step free access, and double width doors. The Reid Gallery is located on the ground floor. For Accessibility Information click here

Image: Detail ‘Switch Track’, (2025), Victoria Morton. Acrylic, oil and collage on canvas, courtesy the artist and The Modern Institute/Toby Webster Ltd., Glasgow. Photo: Patrick Jameson