Malcolm Morley

Macolm Morley (b. 1931, London, England, d. 2018, Bellport, New York) 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). "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." —Roberta Smith, "Art in Review: Malcolm Morely: The Art of Painting," The New York Times, 2005