b. 1973
Heather Morgan, painter chanteuse, is recognizable for sumptuous self-portraits and figurative paintings that vibrate between an intimate vulnerability and potent self-possession. Beauty quivers with pain and flaw in the luminous, distorted subjects that populate Morgan’s paintings. She received her BFA from Boston University and MFA from Yale. Morgan has had solo shows at 3S ArtSpace in Portsmouth, David & Schweitzer Contemporary and Dacia Gallery in New York City, Burkhard Eikelmann in Duesseldorf, and at Ladengalerie in Berlin. Her work has been in group exhibitions at Frosch & Co., Steven Harvey Fine Arts, Lodge Gallery and Charlie James Gallery, among others. She has been included in several publications, among them the Berliner Zeitung, BOMB, Hyperallergic, Whitehot, and the cover artwork of John Waters’ novel, “Mr. Know-It-All: the Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder” published in 2019.
“These recent works are intimate in scale, fragmentary. I have given myself permission to be as much of an expressionist as my earliest loves in painting (I was told I could not do this!), to copy the first painting I ever fell in love with, to make things up! (I have never before deviated from working from observation in some way) and to take on any subject, including no subject at all beyond the beauty of paint, the brevity of existence.”
Q. If you could offer your younger self any advice at the start of your artistic career, what would it be?”
A. “Don’t borrow the maximum, stay in touch with your peers and your mentors, never give up!”