Malcolm Morley \"Marine Sergeant at Valley Forge\" Signed 8/75 & Framed 24x31” For Sale

Malcolm Morley "Marine Sergeant at Valley Forge" Signed 8/75 & Framed 24x31”. Limited original series of 75. Good condition overall- note a couple small stains and wrinkle in bottom of print- nothing distracting. Has been professionally framed and matted. Conservation paper under uv museum glass. Will look great on your wall!

Malcolm Morley (1931-2018) was an English artist living in the United States. He is best known as a photorealist. Morley was born in north London. He had a troubled childhood—after his home was blown up by a bomb during the Blitz in World War II, his family was homeless for a time—and did not discover art until serving a three-year stint in Wormwood Scrubs prison. After release, he studied art first at the Camberwell School of Arts and then at the Royal College of Art (1955–1957), where his fellow students included Peter Blake and Frank Auerbach. In 1956, he saw an exhibition of contemporary American art at the Tate Gallery, and began to produce paintings in an abstract expressionist style.

In the mid 1960s, Morley briefly taught at Ohio State University, and then moved back to New York City, where he taught at SUNY Stony Brook from 1970 through 1974 and the School of Visual Arts. In the early 1980s he was married to the Brazilian artist Marcia Grostein who, during that short and intense period, had a significant influence on his work, especially on his well known beach scenes watercolors He now lives in Bellport, New York in a former church that serves as his home/studio, which he has shared with his wife Linda Morley since 1986. His work was featured as the first temporary exhibit at the Parrish Art Museum in Watermill, New York when it opened in November 2012.

In 1958, a year after leaving the Royal College, Morley moved to New York City, where he saw exhibitions of the work of Jackson Pollock and Balthus, both of whose treatment of their paintings' surfaces influenced him greatly. He considers Cézanne the quintessential sensationalist, and has acknowledged that artist's deep influence on his own work. When Morley moved to New York he also met Barnett Newman, and became influenced by him. He painted a number of works at this time made up of only horizontal black and white bands. Morley visited New York, which was at the time a major center of the Western art world, in 1957. He moved there the following year, after which he met artists including Barnett Newman, Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. His first solo exhibition was at Kornblee Gallery in 1964, partly at the urging of the art dealer Ivan Karp, who had a reputation as a talent spotter and had worked with the legendary dealer Leo Castelli. Influenced in part by them, changed to a photorealist style (Morley prefers the phrase super realist). Inspired by seeing Richard Artschwager using this technique, he began to use a grid to transfer photographic images (often of ships) to canvas, and became one of the first and most noted photorealists, along with Gerhard Richter, Richard Artschwager, and Vija Celmins. He used images (often of ships) from a variety of sources (travel brochures, calendars, old paintings) to canvas as accurately as possible, and became one of the most noted photorealists.

In the 1970s, Morley's work began to be more expressionist, and he began to incorporate collage into his work. Many of his paintings from the mid-70s, such as Train Wreck (1975), depict "catastrophes". Later in the decade, he began to use his own earlier drawings and watercolours as the subject for his paintings. In 1984, Morley won the inaugural Turner Prize. In the 1980's he frequently adopted very loose paint handling, featuring drips and splashes. Similar expressionist brushwork and subject matter by artists such as Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, Georg Baselitz, and Anselm Kiefer resulted in curators identifying a "neo-Expressionist" movement, in which they included him, although he disliked the label. In the 1990s he returned again to a more precise photorealist style, often reproducing images from model aeroplane kits on large canvases. Albert and Vera List made a $1 million gift both to endow the poster and print program and to commission public artworks, like the Jasper Johns painting in the New York State Theater and the Henry Moore sculpture that emerges from the reflecting pool.The Lists had admired the posters designed by artists for institutions like the Paris Opera, and they wanted Lincoln Center to be graced with as distinguished and distinctive graphic art as its European counterparts. Malcolm Morley was selected for a commission.

His most significant student is his ex-wife, Fran Bull. Malcolm Morley is represented by Sperone Westwater, New York and Xavier Hufkens, Brussels.