Artwork of the 80's
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Artists & Works
Malcolm Morley
American (b. England, 1931)
HEAD OF A YOUNG GIRL (1971)
acrylic on canvas
60” x 48”

STYLE: PHOTOREALISM

  

Born in London, Malcolm Morley studied at the Royal College of Art, moving to America in 1958. Morley first became known in the mid-sixties for his realistically rendered ocean-liners, meticulously copied from photographs. In the seventies, Morley’s works became looser, less faithfully realistic and he started to make lush watercolors of exotic scenes.

Like most of Morley’s work, based on a photograph, Head of a Young Girl was painted using a clearly visible grid. Morley is unique among photorealist artists in his ability to insert vivid emotion and a lively intelligence into a set format.

Since his first one-person exhibition in 1957, Morley has had numerous solo exhibitions in Europe and North America and participated in many international exhibitions, including Documenta 5 and 6. Following his first retrospective in 1983 organized by the Whitechapel Art Gallery, Morley was awarded the Turner prize in 1984— the first recipient of this much-acclaimed award. The award was controversial due to Morley’s status as an American citizen.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Ken Johnson, Art in America, 2/89
"There's something oddly oblique about Malcolm Morley's art--it projects a certain inscrutability. Visibly there are expressionistic and primitivistic tendencies, hints of Pop and symbols that imply deep conceptual purposes; but a reckless inconsistency of form and content make a unifying thread of intention nearly indiscernible. One solution is to view Morley as primarily an abstract painter for whom imagery taken from postcards, toys, and other forms of kitsch as well as from mythological and observed scenes serves more as a catalyst for painting than as substantially meaningful content...Throughout the show, there was a feeling of Morley maniacally reveling in the endless possibilities for variation of color, paint application and structural agitation....There's little painterly beauty in Morley's work...one searches in vain for the enigmatically complex symbolic resonance of Beckmann in Morley's perplexingly flat iconography...one wishes Morley would make more inherently meaningful--more psychologically engaging--images, or push the painting-as-process-and-object into more extreme territory, or--ideally--both."
Valentin Tatransky, Arts, 4/79
"Morley is one of our best living painters and one of the very few original painters that we have...Morley is a natural watercolorist and he excels at the medium...Realizing his gifts, Morley discovered that the grid could be a means for developing specifically his own painterly temperament. The grid has ruined more artists today than anything I know of...Unfortunately, the paintings that established Morley's reputation as an artist were also the ones that involved the suppression of his painterly abilities...All art aspires to the condition of pornography, but the best art also gives us genius which is a more concentrated form of Eros. Anyone who pursues Dionysus will eventually run into the Apollonian image...Even though the grid has blown up the scale of the image, the scale of Morley's brushstroke remains constant with respect to his hand. When you get up close to the painting, the image disappears in a sea of pigment."
Peter Plagans, Newsweek, 8/13/01
"Although Morley’s style has changed several times since the cruise-ship pictures, he’s been constantly obsessed with the question of where, and how, an artist’s creativity actually gets into his work. ‘I wonder,’ he says during a break from the studio, ‘about what is ‘copying’ and what is not copying. Can something creative happen without the intent of being invented? Can something come into painting when you’re trying your best not to be inventive or creative? When I’m copying, it’s really sheer concentration on painting; I’m mixing color, mixing paint at a certain velocity and density, and I need it to go down in a certain way. If I look at a painting from the side, I don’t want to see bits of paint sticking out. I want to be painterly without being painterly.’”