Malcolm Morley - Ancient Chinese Horses, 1998

Malcolm Morley

Ancient Chinese Horses, 1998

Edition for Parkett 52
11-color lithograph on Somerset soft white paper
Pencil signed and numbered PP 5/6 on the front
(aside from the regular edition of 60)
printed by Maurice Sanchez, Derrière l’Etoile Studio, New York
This work has been floated and framed in a museum quality wood frame by the renowned BARK frameworks under UV plexiglass/acrylic glazing.
Measurements:
Artwork:
28 inches (vertical) x 37 3/4 inches (horizontal)
frame: 30 1/4 x 40 3/4

Quote from Parkett
“Morley’s work method—and he is an artist who cultivates the most refined ironies—is obsessive and scrupulous, almost mantra-like. The first paintings that brought him notoriety, his superrealist ocean-liners of the 1960s, derive from photographs that he divided in little squares so that he could copy them with the greatest possible accuracy. Seen from a distance, these works look like photographs, but close up they disclose themselves as jubilant pictorial feasts made up of tiny, dynamic brushstrokes.”
Enrique Juncosa, Parkett No. 52, 1998

Additional Quote
"British artist Malcolm Morley is best known for his hyperreal paintings and sculptures that pull subject matter from Old Masters, family portraits, current events, travel brochures, and other visual detritus. Of his attempt to move beyond the strictures of photorealism, Morley says, “I make a handmade painting from a readymade.” … Dissatisfied with merely reproducing the image, he draws …. as in “Ancient Chinese Horses”… from the vivid colors of Pop Art and collage techniques to further draw attention to the image as an object.” -Artsy

PROVENANCE
From The Collection of Milbank, Tweed, Hadley & McCloy
purchased 1978, Marlborough Gallery

Macolm Morley (b. 1931, London, England, d. 2018, Bellport, New York)
Morley is acknowledged as one of the earliest innovators of Superrealism, which developed as a counterpoint to Pop Art in the 1960s. Over the course of his distinguished career, Morley defied stylistic characterization, moving by turns through so-called abstract, realist, Neo-romantic, and Neo-expressionist painterly modes, while being attentive to his own biographical experiences. Morley studied at the Camberwell College of Arts and the Royal College of Art.

Over his lifetime, Morley had numerous presenatations of his work hosted by institutions including the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1983); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1983); Brooklyn Museum, New York (1984); Tate Liverpool (1991); Kunsthalle Basel (1991); Bonnefanten Museum, Maastricht (1992); Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY (1992); Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1993); Fundación La Caixa, Madrid (1995); Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (1996); Hayward Gallery, London (2001); Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2006); Yale School of Art (2012); the Hall Art Foundation, New York (2013-14), and Capitain Petzel, Berlin (2023). He has participated in numerous international surveys, including Documenta 5 (1972) and Documenta 6 (1977), and was awarded the inaugural Turner Prize in 1984, the Painting Award from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1992, and the Francis J. Greenburger Award in 2015. He was inducted into both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2011).

“Mr. Morley’s work has always stressed the tensions between reality, the art of painting and the act of looking. His early efforts were based on glossy postcards of ocean liners, painted in grids one square at a time. The weirdly faceted results reflected his conviction that “painting that doesn’t hallucinate is not painting.”
—Roberta Smith, “Art in Review: Malcolm Morely: The Art of Painting,” The New York Times, 2005