Born in London, England, Malcolm Morley became a photo-realist* painter of subjects that he did in a mocking tone to rail against the seriousness with which people took them. He experimented with many mediums and styles including expressionist abstraction and figurative. He is known as a colorful character with many stories circulating about him including brief jail sentences for carousing and rages that led to mass destruction in his studio.

He studied at the Royal College of Art from 1954 to 1956 and moved to New York City in 1958. During the 1970s, he pursued a variety of styles and mediums, and in the 1980s settled on the photo-real style, taking subject matter from such diverse sources as the Great Masters and postcards.

In 1984, he earned the Turner Prize* for Art from the Tate Gallery. His home and studio have been on Long Island.


Source:
Ronald Pisano, Long Island Landscape Painting



* For more in-depth information about these terms and others, see AskART.com Glossary http://www.askart.com/AskART/lists/Art_Definition.aspx

Malcolm Morley was born in London, England in 1931. He studied at the Royal Academy of Art from 1954 to 1956, and in 1958 he moved to New York City. He pursued a variety of styles and media, and in the 1980s he settled on Photo Realism.

In this style, he became a painter of subjects in a mocking tone to rail against the seriousness with which people took them. He experimented with many mediums and styles including expressionist abstraction. He is known as a colorful character with many stories circulating about him including brief jail sentences for carousing and rages that led to mass destruction in his studio.

Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.

Sources include:
From the internet, AskART.com
Mark Stevens in Newsweek Magazine, January 9, 1984

Malcolm Morley (British, b.1931) is a Contemporary painter who has worked in styles as varied as Photo Realism and Neo-Expressionism. Born in North London, Morley had a difficult childhood and only began painting during a stint in prison. Upon his release, Morley first studied at the Camberwell School of Arts, and then at the Royal College of Art.

Morley frequently painted ships and planes from sources including photographs, newspapers, and model airplanes; he would return to these subjects throughout his career. Inspired by American Abstract Expressionism, Morley moved to New York City in 1958, where he befriended Abstract Expressionist painter Barnett Newman.

In 1964, however, Morley was influenced by the Pop Art of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and pioneered Photo Realism—or "super-realism" as he preferred to call it—in which he created copies of Old Master paintings and images from brochures and newspapers. In the 1970s, his work became more gestural, as he attempted to recreate in oil the loose quality he found in his watercolors, while drawing on imagery from Greek mythology.

He expanded his gestural work in the 1980s to become a leader of Neo-Expressionism, work for which he won the first annual Turner Prize in 1984. At the end of the decade, Morley switched focus again and returned to Photo Realism, and also began making large sculptural installations based on model airplanes. He lives and works in New York.