Aela Morgan’s work appears from December 1, 2024 to May 30, 2025 at The Betsy-South Beach
Featured Exhibition at The Betsy Art Week Miami 2024
Pastel-colored Art Deco buildings are synonymous with South Beach Miami, home to the iconic boutique hotel, The Betsy-South Beach. Built in 1942 in a distinctive colonial-style design and updated in 2009 (and then again in 2017), the venue’s timeless elegance and quietly sophisticated ambiance is a respite from the flamboyance of its Ocean Drive address.
Among its many curated cultural amenities, The Betsy is known for fine art photography exhibits and special exhibits of other media. This year, in conjunction with Art Week Miami Beach, that runs parallel to Art Basel Miami Beach, Betsy curator Lesley Goldwasser celebrates the paintings of Aela Morgan in a collection that reflects the artist’s energy: fast, intense, dynamic, colorful, full of surprises, and with universal (and feminist) messaging. The show will be up for 6 months, closing on 5/30/2025.
Artist's Statement
My work reflects my energy. I am intense and I move fast. I expect the unexpected In my work as in my life. My colors are intense and non-naturalistic; forms are generally distorted; brush work looks and feels uninhibited; and application of whatever medium – acrylic, inks, oils pencils, pastel or mixed – tends to be generous and highly textured, layered and complicated as one might expect from a complex profile: woman, mother, wife, daughter and ardent feminist.
We all experience life through our own unique lenses. My personal journey of immigration, coupled with an insatiable curiosity, has opened me up to many different ways of life and philosophies. And the older I get, the more I have come to understand the universal themes inherent in our shared humanity – and that too is what I paint.
We hold certain truths to be self-evident. My truth is that I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve. I put it onto my canvases.
About the Artist
Aela Morgan is a citizen of the world who currently maintains a studio practice in Telluride. Her works are her personal responses to the biting reality of human existence and all its beauties and atrocities
ARTWORK BY AELA MORGAN, SHARED WITH PERMISSION
BULL RIDE- reframes the mythic “Rape of Europa,” the story immortalized in a painting by the famed Venetian artist Titian painted (ca. 1560–1562). In the myth, the god Zeus assumed the form of a bull and enticed the beauty Europa to climb onto his back. Once there, the bull rode into the sea and carried the maiden to Crete where he revealed his true identity. Here the lady is in charge, having tamed the bull.
