Malcolm Morley Art

Art Brokerage specializes in the artwork of Malcolm Morley. b. 1931. In the early 1970s Morley's interest in the life and work of van Gogh as representative of the myth of the romantic artist led him to shoot 11 hours of film as part of a project called The Discipline of Vincent, the Ballroom Dancer. From 1975 to 1976 he produced a number of pictures depicting scenes of disaster, such as Train Wreck (1975; Vienna, Mus. 20. Jhts), in which he seemed to be destroying the remnants of his own previous style. While working in Tampa, FL, for 18 months from 1977 to 1979 he began using his own watercolours and drawings as models for his oil paintings, much as he had previously used found material, claiming that the method allowed him the freedom to incorporate abrupt changes of scale as a challenge to conventional hierarchies. A series of watercolours and drawings of the archaeology and landscape of Crete and Greece, which he visited in 1982, formed the basis of some of his later paintings, such as Albatross (1985; see 1986 exh. cat.), painted in an energetic style that invited comparison with the work of younger Neo-expressionist painters working in Europe and the USA. In 1984 Morley was the first recipient of the Turner Prize administered through the Tate Gallery in London.