Freedom for figures to live.Space for language to play.

Communication designer Morris Aberham has turned his first name into a brand, under which he has carved out a space for his artistic work and experimentation.

As an artist and author, MORRIS explores the world and the essence of human beings. His figure drawings interrogate the expression of mental and emotional states, while his writings attend to the traces left between people by the passage of time.

These visual and textual studies are brought together in his book projects.

Drawing the things that move us

For over 30 years, MORRIS has been developing his own distinctive style of freehand figure drawing. He produced his first figure drawings in the early 1990s while studying under Prof. Otto Näscher at Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen. Since then, MORRIS has focused on drawing figures using the very simplest of methods.

“I create my drawings with as few brush or pencil strokes as possible. The idea is that they should ‘click’ right away. I concentrate on the direct expression you can achieve on a piece of paper with a brush or pencil and a single color. Working within those constraints, the human figure has emerged as a dominant theme of my work.”

MORRIS’s expressive figures embody a certain behavior or feeling. Arrogance, pride, envy, fear, greed, love, lust – each of these states has its own distinctive expression. MORRIS creates a society of figures, animated by emotion and full of life. The viewer always encounters these figures in isolation, with only minimal background.

The drawings are produced on myriad materials of modern everyday life, from scraps of paper and card to plastic film and flat pieces of discarded packaging. They are turned into canvases, into stages on which the figures perform.

MORRIS’s world of figures is constantly evolving. His newer works experiment with using more colors, and introduce pairs or small groups of figures.

The illustrated book Leute presents a selection from 30 years of drawings.

Documenting the things that fascinate us

Thanks to his professional creative work with headlines, slogans, and other texts, MORRIS has always paid keen attention to the quality, style, and artistry of language.

In the mid-1990s, he began putting his ideas to paper. At first, this took the form of fleeting, fragmentary notes in sketchbooks. Later, he started to write stories and poems. In the 2010s, he published his first books, which flesh out the texts and combine them with his drawings and photographs.

MORRIS’s stories, ideas, and poems are compiled in his book Zeitpunkte.

MORRIS