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The fundamental aspect, the motor that drove Malcolm‘s passion for painting, was sensation. Sensation being the unmediated bodily response to the outside world through the senses; in this case, the sense of sight. Malcolm admired the art of Van Gogh, Cézanne and Picasso, artists whom he felt were more concerned with presenting the world as something made with paint, to create a new visual experience, rather than being concerned with what the subject matter was ‘about’.
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Malcolm said he wanted to get the painting directly into the nervous system:
...the emphasis is very much on the idea of looking at. I paint them from the way in which I’m looking at them, which is really from the point of view of sensations. I feel the sensation of it, and preimagine it made of paint. ...So it’s not just a question of looking, but of doing, in relation to this, in relation to that, in relation to the space between things. In a way, it’s very classical.
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Malcolm Morley
Melee at Agincourt, 2017Oil on linen
Signed recto
Image dimensions: 193 x 289.6 cm / 76 x 114 inches
Framed dimensions: 198 x 295 cm / 78 x 116.1 inches -
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The grid he used to format and scale up the images ensured that every square centimeter of the canvas received his focused attention, heightening the experience so that the finished painting represented his initial sensation with the same concentration. Each square was treated as a small abstract painting of its own, taken all together they make one unified area. Unity in diversity, diversity in unity.
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Malcolm Morley’s blues are extraordinary. Card-table flat and infinite, they collapse all sense of proximity. At once remote and wild with their gnarly collisions of space and time, Morley’s paintings induce a sublime kind of nausea.
- Dana Schutz
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Malcolm Morley
O.K., 2015Oil on linen
Signed recto
Image dimensions: 67.3 x 160 cm / 26.5 x 63 inches
Framed dimensions: 71 x 165 cm / 28 x 65 inches -
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Malcolm was a great artist and one of the most purely creative and innovative painters I’ve ever had the privilege to meet. Just the other day I was contacted by a friend/young painter who is crazy about Malcolm’s work. He asked me if I thought the “art world” ever got Morley’s work. I replied that I wasn’t sure if Malcolm ever got Morley’s work.
- Eric Fischl
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Malcolm Morley takes the image, puts a grid on top of it, and numbers it. When he makes the painting, he is not actually seeing the image. He paints it in an abstract, not repre- sentational, mode. In his painting School of Athens (1972), based on Raphael’s painting, he was so caught up in filling out the little squares of his grid, one by one, that he only noticed later that a whole row was off, all the heads of the philosophers floating next to their respective bodies. And he decided that he liked the way it looked and left it. My father-in-law saw the painting in his studio at the time, and he told me that story. So by being concerned with precisely rendering the image, he happily loses it. The painting has a weird paradoxical beauty, neither figurative nor abstract – a painting about painting. I am interested in these broken moments and the unbelievable stubbornness in his work, the way he obsesses about the image and ignores it at the same time.
- Charline von Heyl
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Malcolm Morley
Ring of Fire, 2009Oil and string on linen with separate oil on linenSigned rectoImage dimensions: 223.5 x 207 cm / 88 x 81.5 inches
Framed dimensions: 225 x 209.5 cm / 88.6 x 82.5 inches -
Malcolm Morley
Fire Island with a Second Ending, 1974Oil on canvas with paper collage on three panelsImage dimensions: 150 x 380 cm / 60 x 150 inchesCourtesy Wendy Gondeln -
Selected Institutional Exhibitions
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Selected Press
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Artpulse
Malcolm Morley November 30, 2019 -
The Brooklyn Rail
In Memoriam: A Tribute to Malcolm Morley August 3, 2018 -
The Telegraph
Malcolm Morley, inaugural Turner Prize winner – obituary June 17, 2018 -
The New York Times
Malcolm Morley, Genre-Crossing Artist, Is Dead at 86 June 7, 2018 -
ARTnews
Heavy Artillery: At 83, Malcolm Morley Is Still Doing Battle April 21, 2015 -
Bordercrossings
Malcolm Morley: The Principal of Uncertainty November 2006
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Ph: Jason Schmidt
Courtesy – The Estate of Malcolm Morley
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Malcolm Morley: Sensations: Curated by Michael Short
Current viewing_room
