Morgan’s is a practice we have returned to with real affection, and one that has long felt very close to OIGÅLL. Following his 2026 Archibald Prize finalist Yvette, these new works continue his exploration of portraiture at the edge of recognition, while extending a much broader enquiry into how paintings exist in a world increasingly experienced through screens. Across his practice, Stokes has described this shift in perception as the “virtual gaze” the way a painting can become flattened, circulated and consumed as an image, rather than encountered as a physical object.

His portraits push directly against that flattening. Working in watercolour on Belgian linen, Stokes allows pigment to bleed into the tooth of the fabric, softening the image until the figure seems to sit somewhere between apparition and material fact. The linen is not simply a support but part of the image itself; its texture, absorbency and physical presence remain visible, even as a face, flower or body begins to emerge. In earlier writing about the series, Stokes has spoken about wanting the work to exist simultaneously as something literal, abstract and illusionistic, an image that reveals itself differently depending on how, and how long, it is looked at.

That tension between image and object runs through Morgan’s wider practice. He has repeatedly stripped painting back to pigment, cloth, stretcher and support, asking what remains essential when artworks are so often first encountered digitally. In that sense, these new portraits feel particularly resonant: intimate and recognisable, but never entirely resolved. They ask for time. They shift with distance. They refuse to behave quite the same way on a screen as they do in the room.