Malcolm Morley: Shipwreck art | NSU Museum

Beginning November 20 through April 16, 2023, NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale will present Malcolm Morley: Shipwreck, in collaboration with Hall Art Foundation. Malcolm Morley (b. London, 1931-2018) achieved widespread acclaim in the 1960s for his photo-based paintings. This exhibition focuses on the recurring ship motif in Morley’s work from his earliest superrealist paintings of ocean liners in the 1960s to his imaginative paintings of complex compositions of battles and other catastrophes based on still-lifes he arranged of toy model boats and planes in later years.

As a child, Morley enjoyed making model boats and planes from balsa wood. He was only 13 when his treasured battleship HMS Nelson was destroyed in a German bombing raid that demolished part of his family home during World War II. This model, its perfection forever forestalled, was the underlying inspiration for his maritime scenes. Morley and his wife Lida resided in Bellport, New York, on the shore of Bellport Bay, a favorite seaside painting spot of the early 20th-century realist artist William J. Glackens, whose exhibition By the Sea, By the Sea runs concurrently with Malcolm Morley: Shipwreck.

This exhibition, curated by Bonnie Clearwater, Director and Chief Curator, combines Morley’s signature subjects and highlights the mastery of color and composition. His painting technique, which he called ‘Superrealism’, revolves around his exquisite rendering of details based  on photographic sources. Morley consistently selected images that were compositionally related to art historical painting genres, such as complex battle scenes, or held autobiographical connotations. As Morley stated about his paintings, the “hook is the image, but the real subject” is the act of painting itself. Like his close colleagues Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein and conceptual artist Richard Artschwager, Morley’s paintings of photographic subjects  yielded  compositions that are simultaneously figurative and abstract. His experimental approach to painting helped to open up the potential of Modern art for the subsequent generation of post-modern artists, including Julian Schnabel, Albert Oehlen and David Salle.

Born on June 7, 1931 in London, England, Morley studied at the Camberwell College of Arts and the Royal College of Art. After Morley’s  first New York show in 1964, he had numerous solo exhibitions in Europe and North America and participated in many international surveys. In 1984, he was awarded the inaugural Turner Prize, an award given annually to a visual artist born in or based in Great Britain. His works can be found in numerous museum collections around the world.