Malcolm Morley

For the rock musician of the same name, see Malcolm Morley (musician).

Malcolm Morley (born June 7, 1931) is an English artist now living in the United States. He is best known as a photorealist.

Tackle, 2004.

Life

Morley was born in north London. He had a troubled childhood—after his home was blown up by a bomb during World War II, his family was homeless for a time—--and did not discover art until serving a three-year stint in Wormwood Scrubs prison. After release, he studied art first at the Camberwell School of Arts and then at the Royal College of Art (1955–1957), where his fellow students included Peter Blake and Frank Auerbach. In 1956, he saw an exhibition of contemporary American art at the Tate Gallery, and began to produce paintings in an abstract expressionist style.

In the mid 1960s Morley briefly taught at Ohio State University, and then moved back to New York City, where he taught at the School of Visual Arts. He now lives in Brookhaven Hamlet, Long Island in a former church that serves as his home/studio, which he has shared with his wife Lida Morley since 1986.

Work

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 considers Cézanne the quintessential sensationalist, and has acknowledged that artist's 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 (Morley prefers the phrase super realist). He often used a grid to transfer photographics 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.

Red Arrows, 2000.

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 watercolours 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 Potempkin''.

His most significant student is his ex-wife, Fran Bull. Malcolm Morley is represented by Sperone Westwater, New York and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.

Other information

Richard Milazzo has written the book Malcolm Morley in 2000, and Jean-Claude Liebenstein wrote Malcolm Morley: Itineraries (Reaktion Books, 2001).

External links

• Works by Malcolm Morley at the Hirshhorn Museum - site has moved
• Malcolm Morley at Xavier Hufkens, Brussels
• Exhibitions at Artfacts
• Malcolm Morley at Sperone Westwater
• Malcolm Morley in conversation with Robert Ayers, May 2009
• Malcolm Morley Biography
• "Malcolm Morley Another Way to Make an Image, Monotypes" by Robert Storr, The Brooklyn Rail
• Malcolm Morley in Conversation with Phong Bui, The Brooklyn Rail, March 2012