Malcolm Morley attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1952 - 1953.
Malcolm Morley attended the Royal College of Art from 1954 until 1957.
Malcolm Morley attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1952 - 1953.
Malcolm Morley attended the Royal College of Art from 1954 until 1957.
Malcolm Morley was born in London on June 7, 1931. His childhood memories of the Blitz would continue to shape his repertoire of motifs: the bombed city, the Royal Navy, a model airplane he played with. He spent adolescence in the bleak post-war years, during which Morley even had a brief stint in prison for theft.
Malcolm Morley attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1952 - 1953 and the Royal College of Art from 1954 until 1957.
Drawn to Abstract Expressionism, Malcolm Morley finally left London for New York in 1958. In 1958, a year after leaving the Royal College, Morley moved to New York City, where he saw exhibitions of the work of Jackson Pollock and Balthus, both of whose treatment of their paintings' surfaces influenced him greatly. He considered Cézanne the quintessential sensationalist and acknowledged that artist had deep influence on his own work.
When Morley moved to New York he also met Barnett Newman and became influenced by him. He painted a number of works at this time made up of only horizontal black and white bands. He also met Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and, influenced in part by them, changed to a photorealist style. He often used a grid to transfer photographic images (often of ships) from a variety of sources (travel brochures, calendars, old paintings) to canvas as accurately as possible, and became one of the most noted photorealists.
In the 1970s, Morley's work began to be more expressionist, and he began to incorporate collage into his work. Many of his paintings from the mid-70s, such as “Train Wreck” (1975), depict "catastrophes." Later in the decade, he began to use his own earlier drawings and watercolors as the subject for his paintings. In 1984, Morley won the inaugural Turner Prize. In the 1990s he returned again to a more precise photorealist style, often reproducing images from model aeroplane kits on large canvases.
His work often draws upon various sources in a process of cross-fertilization. For example, his painting “The Day of the Locust” (1977) draws its title from the novel “The Day of the Locust”, by Nathanael West. One scene in the painting is drawn from the opening scene of the novel, and other scenes are drawn from the 1954 film “Suddenly” and the 1925 Sergei Eisenstein film “Battleship Potemkin.”
Dissatisfied with his pictures, at that time light monochrome relief surfaces articulated in the horizontal, Morley sought representational motifs. At first working with a reduced palette from newspaper photos of battleships, Malcolm Morley developed a Photorealist style in 1964, which entailed accurately transferring color photos as raster elements to canvas.
In the early 1970s gestural touches began to break into Morley's pictures and his motifs increasingly attested to violence and destruction (for instance "Train Wreck", 1975). While staying in Florida, Morley developed a new technique: he now executed his paintings after watercolors he did as preliminaries. His subjects were inspired by Greek mythology and Mediterranean scenery encountered on his extensive travels.
By the early 1980s Malcolm Morley was so well established as a leading Neo-Expressionist that he was the first winner of the prestigious Turner Prize in London in 1984. Towards the close of the 1980s, Morley returned to his early motif repertoire of ships and planes, which now figured in large-scale installations that were a combination of paintings and mobiles. Morley was now painting from models observed through a camera obscura system. He lived in Brookhaven Hamlet, Long Island in a former church that served as his home/studio, which he shared with his wife Lida Morley since 1986.
By the mid-1990s, however, he again reverted to more exact rendering, now using model planes from sets, which he represented in two dimensions but with an abstract tendency. In recent years Malcolm Morley has painted in a figurative style accompanied by a reticently gestural approach, translating photographic images into spatially complex paintings. Morley has remained in America, his adopted country. Morely passed away June 2, 2018. Malcolm Morley is represented by Sperone Westwater, New York and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.
State Cabin (Room 2)
Tackle
Untitled
Bridgehampton Beach with Figures
Key Biscayne Florida
Beach Scene
Onsettant Moie
Barcelona Cathedral as a Blood Red Orange
Horses
Maroon Bells
Natural History
Massai
The Navigators
Drums in Friendship Maine
Erotic Fruito
Lifeboat I
Beach Scene
Statue of Liberty
Safety is Your Business
Morley's practice of dissolving a motif into non-representational raster surfaces, which he would sometimes paint on upside-down canvases, continued to link him with his abstract beginnings. Morley developed this unusual act of pictorial creation into Performances, in which the occasionally defective end product, the representational image, was of secondary significance. Despite his individuality, Morley is regarded as a precursor of Photorealism, for which he coined the term Superrealism. Malcolm Morley's motifs at the time were both contemporary scenes, which placed him close to Pop art, and copies of Old Master paintings.
Quotations:
“I feel that Barney Newman emptied space and I’m filling it up again.”
“The idea is to have no idea. Get lost. Get lost in the landscape.”
Malcolm Morley was married five times. His most significant student was his ex-wife, Fran Bull. His last wife was Lida Morley.
