Liam Gillick Cai Guo Qiang Norman Foster Piet Mondrian Sarah Morris Rem Koolhaas Live from Italy, It’s Artissima Liu Ye

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The first time I visited Sarah Morris’s studio, the space was crammed with her new "Rings" series — enormous canvases that represent various Olympic Games past and future, complex diagrams of lurid overlapping circles. Her studio door is tall and slender, specially adapted so that the nine-foot-high canvases can fit through it, and when we met a few weeks later the paintings had made their exit, having been shipped to London and Munich, where Morris has solo shows this summer. In their absence, she was hanging dollhouse-size versions of the works in a scale model of the White Cube gallery. One 75-foot-long painting, whose cogs mesh together with a forceful dynamism, is made up of eight separate panels and will wrap around three entire walls.

Morris erupted onto the art scene in the mid-’90s with glossy abstract canvases and stylish films that mined the urban landscape for their source material. Her studio is in the Starrett-Lehigh building, a landmark of modernist industrial architecture located in Chelsea, New York’s gallery district. (Coincidentally, Modern Painters also has its new offices in the same site.) Lewis Mumford, writing in The New Yorker in 1931, called the building, which occupies an entire block, "a victory for engineering." When he praised "the contrast between the long, continuous red-brick bands and the green-framed windows, with sapphire reflections or depths...as sound a use of color as one can see about the city," he could almost have been describing one of Morris’s vivid architectonic paintings. The dizzying façades of skyscrapers often reflect others in her canvases, overlaying grids with grids. Though perhaps not apparent at first glance, Morris intends her pulsating displays to be critiques of capitalism.

Morris, a 41-year-old Brown University semiotics graduate who has always spoken articulately about her work, tells me that she seeks not to represent, but to borrow from architecture. "What interests me about architecture," she explains, "is really its cinematic potential, and its potential to empower people. I like the idea of trying to use various effects of architecture, whether it has to do with scale or certain ideologies of place." Her sources are eclectic: she’s as inspired by the curvaceous and theatrical buildings of architects such as John Lautner (who is featured in "A View to Kill For") and Morris Lapidus as she is by the science fiction novels of J. G. Ballard and "the way he posits action and ideology in space." Architecture, for Morris, is above all about power and psychology, and the colors and cat’s cradle geometry of each series are carefully chosen to create a specific politics and poetics of place.

While her new canvases are large, she has built other paintings on an even more architecturally ambitious scale. In 2006, she made a piece for Lever House, on Park Avenue in Manhattan, inspired by her conversations with the seminal ’70s screenwriter Robert Towne, who won an Oscar for Chinatown. Morris liked the idea of bringing a flavor of the stories of intrigue and political corruption for which Towne is famous into a corporate Midtown context. It was a kind of refracted portrait in graphic abstractions, a 19,744-square-foot temporary mural that covered the ceiling inside the glassed-in lobby with shards of color, and continued outside over the building’s pedestrian walkways. "You really get a sense of an expanded grid," Morris says, "of how the paintings are part of a larger whole which you’re not privy to."

Morris’s new work, however, departs from the rigor of the modernist grid, with its echoes of skyscrapers and Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie, to embrace concentric forms. "To me, the Olympic logo is sort of like an afterthought," she explains of the "Rings" series. Beijing, where the upcoming Olympic Games will be held, is a decentered city composed of several ring roads — six-lane highways that are, she says, "constantly expanding, with no real architectural markers against which to situate yourself. You have this feeling of déjà vu as you’re going around and around." In her paintings, this chaotic urban plan serves as a metaphor for China’s runaway economy.