THE BACKSTORY

Created as a visual homage to Henri Matisse's Goldfish series, Donna Morin's Swimming with Matisse's Fish invites viewers to transcend observation and dive directly into the artist's imaginative waterworld. Where Matisse's fish once floated as subjects of meditation and stillness, Morin reimagines their habitat as an active, lived space. Rather than peering through glass, she asks what it might feel like to move freely among their fluid shapes, immersed in rhythms of color, motion, and design.

Morin's piece emerged from her fascination with pattern, an expertise she honed during her years at Geary's, where she refined her curatorial eye for textile interplay and design combinations. Drawing on the lineage of Modernism and Cubism, she transforms Matisse's meditative tranquility into kinetic abstraction. Layers of turquoise and coral pulse against fragmentary geometry, transforming the fishbowl into a world of perpetual metamorphosis.

This work stands as a playful dialogue across time: Matisse's contemplative goldfish encounter Morin's contemporary sensibility, producing a composition that feels both nostalgic and forward-looking. The viewer swims, metaphorically, inside the bowl, within a harmony of pattern and emotion, where meditation gives way to motion and observation transforms into experience.