Sarah Morris is a painter and filmmaker whose work deals with the language of the urban environment. Morris studied semiotics at Brown University and her work is informed by an interest in signs and the de-coding of our environment, touching on architecture, social structures, the commodification of desire and, frequently, the intersection of all three.

In the mid 1990s at the start of her career, Morris made text paintings that used the bombastic and iconic vocabulary of media headlines as visual statements on the canvas in a bright pop palette. She recast the emotive power of words such as ‘insane', ‘guilty' and ‘liar' in the same sans serif typeface that she also used for words such as ‘Johnny', ‘sugar' and ‘donuts'. These text paintings evoke urban America filtered through a blank Warholian aesthetic. Conceptually open-ended while at the same time appearing as visually ‘complete', they are an astute take on the role of language as a tool of power in contemporary society.

It seemed, therefore, a logical jump for Morris to move from the ‘signs' of the city (from its advertising and media) to its architecture and urban landscape. Morris has made five series of works to date – incorporating both painting and film – based on different American cities: New York, Las Vegas, Washington DC, Miami and most recently, Los Angeles. She makes bright, abstract paintings that are complex and rigorous; chromatically coloured grids executed in brilliant household gloss paint on square-format canvases. Morris has described her films as ‘condensed manifestos' for the paintings, in the sense that they are a compendium of images and situations that could provide the visual source and psychological complexity from which the paintings begin and abstractly devolve. Her films attempt to place the cities they depict within a hyper-narrative set during a very distinct period of time.

In her initial Midtown (1998-9) series, based on New York, Morris codified the corporate, Modernist architecture of midtown Manhattan into square grids that obliquely reference the urban geometric abstraction of Piet Mondriaan. In her Midtown (1998) film, which was shot in a single day, Morris collated visual fragments of the city in an arrestingly fast-paced but blunt and direct image of New York daily life, in particular, the comings and goings of people through a revolving door at the entrance to the Seagram Building, an iconic, 1950s architectural classic designed by Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson.

Following ‘Midtown', Morris made a series of works entitled Neon [Las Vegas]. In Las Vegas, Morris was struck by the way that the city reinvents its architecture every few years and the way that its advertising and architecture have become progressively more integrated over time. Morris' film, AM PM (1999), examines the famous Los Angeles ‘strip', portraying the disorientating world of its cavernous, corporate, mega-hotels and casinos. Both Morris' AM PM and its accompanying paintings depict elements of the neon architecture of the city, in particular, the huge light advertising structures that are built into the surface of the façade of the buildings – a phenomenon which has redefined the notion of ‘spectacle' in relation to the built environment. Morris has described AM PM as an attempt to use “the concept of distraction itself as a strategy and the city as a conspiracy”, a procedure that “manipulates and directs the visitor”.

In Capital (2000), Morris shot Washington DC during the last days of the Clinton administration, gaining access to a cabinet meeting, press conference and other hives of political control. The film became a record, in effect, of what would now be almost unimaginable access to the centres of power. First shown at the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the film is coolly distant in its approach, appearing to suggest a possible matrix of narratives that might or might not develop, between various sites of the city such as The Mall, the White House, the World Bank and The Pentagon.

Likewise, in Miami (2002), various coded sites of production, leisure and work are depicted, such as the Coca-Cola bottling plant, the Grand Prix and the sleek hotel architecture of Morris Lapidus. For Morris, Miami is a city that epitomises both fantasy and frustration, a politically ambiguous city with a ‘hidden' agenda that is intimated in the film through a clandestine filming technique and the repetitive, sequenced soundtrack. For Morris, Miami brings together “a driving sequence of urban images that combine towards a new ultra-vision of a place”. The paintings from this series, entitled Pools [Miami], reference the tropical Modernism of the city's architecture, its specific palette, and employ dramatic shifts in perspective from the long shot to the close up, simultaneously in a single work.

Morris is adept at using the methods of seduction and deflection as a visual and conceptual strategy in her work. Her paintings and films investigate both the surface of a city – its architecture and geography – as well as its ‘interior': the psychology of its inhabitants and key players. Her paintings have become increasingly disorientating over time, with their internal vortex-like spaces working to pull the picture beyond the reality of the canvas as a two-dimensional object. In Morris' most recent work based on Los Angeles, the city is caught at its most ebullient and narcissistic moment: the week running up to and including the Oscars. Entitled simply Los Angeles , the film focuses on the city's unique and spectacular architecture; its sprawling, de-centred urban plan and, most importantly, its role as a centre for image production. It gives an ‘inside' look at an industry that is fuelled by fantasy (shots of Botox injections and laser eye surgery for example, are paired with shots of the rehearsals of the Oscars) and the relationship between studio, producer, director and talent is exposed in scenes with legendary producers such as Dino de Laurentiis and Robert Evans alongside numerous Hollywood ‘A-list' actors. Morris' new, Los Angeles paintings are a development from her earlier series of canvases, since their grids are more fragmentary. In paintings such as Bonaventure [Los Angeles] (2004) she has used octagons to form the image, obliquely referencing the city's layout as well as hinting at the clustered and bureaucratic social network of a city that constantly shifts between documentary and fiction. In the painting, Century Plaza [Los Angeles] (2004) the grid is reduced to a few single lines or vectors which cut dramatically across the canvas, leading the eye to the edge of and beyond the picture plane, its schematised reduction akin to a mental image of a particular and temporal urban view. In Los Angeles , as in all of Morris' films, the artist employs very different kinds of cinematography – from documentary recording to an apparently narrative scenario – the combination of which works as a method of visual distraction (what Martin Prinzhorn has termed “automatist closure”); a way of exploring the urban environment, and more particularly its issues of social power and representation.

Sarah Morris has exhibited in solo and group shows internationally. She has had solo exhibitions at Kunstforeningen, Copenhagen, Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Kunsthalle Zurich, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst

Leipzig, MOMA Oxford and Le Consortium, Dijon. Her films have recently been screened at MOMA, New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington DC.