Malcolm Morley was born in London in 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. After an adolescence spent in the bleak post-war years, during which Morley even had a brief stint in prison for theft, he attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts in 1952-53 and the Royal College of Art from 1954 until 1957. Drawn to Abstract Expressionism, Malcolm Morley finally left London for New York in 1958. Dissatisfied with his pictures, at that time light monochrome relief surfaces articulated in the horizontal, Morley now 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 colour photos as raster elements to canvas. 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. 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. 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.
SELECTED PUBLIC COLLECTIONS
Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York
Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Oslo, Norway
Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht, Holland
Broad Foundation, Los Angeles, California.
Detroit Art Institute, Michigan.
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, New York.
Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University, Ithaca, New York
Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC
Kröller-Müller Museum. Netherlands
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebaek, Denmark
Ludwig Forum für Internationale Kunst, Aachen, Germany
Ludwig Museum, Budapest
Ludwig Museum, Cologne
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Musée national d'art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Spain
Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Ilinois
Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California
The Museum of Modern Art, New York
Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Utrecht, Netherlands
National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri
National Air and Space Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC
The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York
Sammlung Frieder Burda, Baden-Baden, Germany
Seattle Art Museum, Seattle, Washington
Tate, London, England
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond
Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York
