Macolm Morley (1931-2018, UK)
Morley is acknowledged as one of the earliest innovators of Superrealism, which developed as a counterpoint to Pop Art in the 1960s. Over the course of his distinguished career, Morley defied stylistic characterization, moving by turns through so-called abstract, realist, Neo-romantic, and Neo-expressionist painterly modes, while being attentive to his own biographical experiences. Morley studied at the Camberwell College of Arts and the Royal College of Art.
Over his lifetime, Morley had numerous presenatations of his work hosted by institutions including the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1983); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1983); Brooklyn Museum, New York (1984); Tate Liverpool (1991); Kunsthalle Basel (1991); Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (1992); Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY (1992); Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1993); Fundación La Caixa, Madrid (1995); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (1996); Hayward Gallery, London (2001); Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2006); Yale School of Art (2012); the Hall Art Foundation, New York (2013-14), and Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2023). He has participated in numerous international surveys, including Documenta 5 (1972) and Documenta 6 (1977), and was awarded the inaugural Turner Prize in 1984, the Painting Award from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1992, and the Francis J. Greenburger Award in 2015. He was inducted into both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2011).
Malcolm Morley, Rat Tat Tat, 2001, Oil on linen, 94 x 197 inches. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.
Mr. Morley's work has always stressed the tensions between reality, the art of painting and the act of looking. His early efforts were based on glossy postcards of ocean liners, painted in grids one square at a time. The weirdly faceted results reflected his conviction that "painting that doesn't hallucinate is not painting."
Installation view, Malcolm Morley: Paintings, 1965-82, The Brooklyn Museum, NY, 1983
1931 Born in North London
1958 Moves to New York, gets married, and lives in Queens. In NYC, Morley meets Salvador Dali, Milton Resnik, and Barnett Newman.
1964 Ivan Karp arranges his first show of abstract paintings at Jill Kornblee Gallery. Morley begins the Superrealist paintings at this time and re-introduces the grid after visiting Richard Artschwager.
1966 included in The Photographic Image at Guggenheim with Rauschenberg, Rosenquist and Richard Estes. This show puts Morley on the map and launches a series of group and solo exhibitions.
1970s Morley's seamless finish to his paintings gives way to overt displays of bravura brushwork, placing him in the camp of Bad Painting and Neo-Expressionism.
1983 Whitechapel Art Gallery retrospective travels to Basel, Rotterdam, London, Washington, Chicago and New York
1984 Wins Turner prize, which was controversial at the time
Malcolm Morley, Mariner, 1998, Oil on canvas, 116.2 x 147.6 inches. Collection of the Tate, UK.
Early 1990s Morley drops the vigorous brushwork that had lent his previous paintings seductiveness. Starts making sculpture and working models into his paintings.
1991 Exhibition of watercolors at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht, which travels to Kunsthalle Basel, Basel, Switzerland; Tate Gallery Liverpool, Liverpool, UK; The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY, USA
1992 After the airplanes, Morley starts to make paper scale models of other kinds of objects – a whole assortment of boats, lighthouses, and other buildings. Morley buys model kits, but replaces the kit’s materials with watercolor paper, which he paints over. An exchange is initiated between these three-dimensional objects and their flat, painted copies on canvas.
1993 Survey exhibition travels from Musée national d’art moderne Centre de création industrielle, Paris, France, to Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, France; Centre Régional d’Art Contemporain Midi-Pyrénées, Labège-Toulouse, France
Late 1990s With the models emerges a new way of painting, characterized by dense color and hard contours. These effects are achieved by using non-diluted paint, fine sable brushes and masks of plastic. The visual effect of these new paintings lies at the opposite extreme from the broad splashes of the 80’s. The new models are painstakingly cut out, colored, assembled and colored again. As a result, these works of the 90's are well drawn and precise.
Installation view, Malcolm Morley: Painting, Paper, Process, Parrish Art Museum, Water Mill, New York, NY, 2012
1999-2018 Morley has six exhibitions with Sperone Westwater
2006 Solo show at the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami
2008 Morley presents the figure of a motocross rider as a mythic hero, creating a kind of contemporary American mythology in paint. The penciled grid under the painted racer undercuts Morley's photorealism, and an actual racing glove is pinned to the painting, drawing attention to the racer's immateriality.
2012 Solo exhibition of paintings and works on paper at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill, NY
2013 Solo exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology at the University of Oxford
2017 Institutional presentation at the Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Derneburg Museum in Germany
2018-Present The bulk of available works remaining in the estate are from 2009 to Malcom’s passing in 2018 and include series of knights, motocross riders and fighter planes and pilots.
2022 Exhibition at the Nova Southern University Art Museum in Fort Lauderdale
2023 Solo exhibition at Capitain Petzel in Berlin
Malcolm Morley
Melee at Agincourt
2017
Oil on linen
76 x 114 inches
193 x 289.5 cm
Malcolm Morley
Knight 1
2016
Oil on linen with oil on wood attachment
63 x 53 inches
160 x 134.6 cm
Malcolm Morley
The Alamo
2015
Oil on linen
50 x 50 inches
127 x 127 cm
Malcolm Morley
The Island of the Day Before
2013
Oil on linen
74 x 67 inches
188 x 170.5 cm
Malcolm Morley
Covergirl
2012
Oil on linen
109 x 77 3/8 inches
277 x 198 cm
Malcolm Morley
Thor
2008
Oil on linen with cloth and rubber glove attachment
84 x 63 inches
213.4 x 160 cm
Malcolm Morley
THE NAVAL OFFICER
1964
Oil on canvas
16 7/8 x 16 inches
42.9 x 40.6 cm
Installation view, Malcolm Morley: Shipwreck, Nova Southern University Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 2022
Installation view, Malcolm Morley: Shipwreck, Nova Southern University Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 2022
Installation view, Malcolm Morley: Shipwreck, Nova Southern University Art Museum, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, 2022
Installation view, Malcolm Morley: Works from the Hall Collection, Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Derneburg Museum, Derneburg, Germany, 2017-18
Installation view, Malcolm Morley: Works from the Hall Collection, Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Derneburg Museum, Derneburg, Germany, 2017-18
Installation view, Malcolm Morley: Works from the Hall Collection, Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Derneburg Museum, Derneburg, Germany, 2017-18
Installation view, Malcolm Morley: Works from the Hall Collection, Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Derneburg Museum, Derneburg, Germany, 2017-18
Installation view, Malcolm Morley at the Ashmolean: Paintings and Drawings from the Hall Collection, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, 2013
Installation view, Malcolm Morley at the Ashmolean: Paintings and Drawings from the Hall Collection, Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK, 2013
Installation view, Malcolm Morley: Paintings, 1965-82, The Brooklyn Museum, NY, 1983
Installation view, Malcolm Morley: Paintings, 1965-82, The Brooklyn Museum, NY, 1983
