British painter, now working in America, Morley studied at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts (1952-53) and at the Royal College of Art (1954-57), in London. In 1958, he moved to New York, where he has lived ever since, except for the short intervals spent in Toronto during the late 1950s, in Berlin on a DAAD Fellowship in 1977, and in Florida during the late 1970s. He has developed an abstract idiom influenced by Barnett Newman, limiting himself to horizontal bands of black and white. In 1964, he began to concentrate on photographs of ships which he would copy meticulously in trompe l'oeil. These works marked the beginning of Photo Realism in the United States which the artist preferred to call Super Realism. His photo realist paintings focused on themes such as racism and apartheid, creating a tension that highlights the ambiguity between perception and reality. In the mid 70's, he gave up Photo Realism as a style and became interested in reinterpretations of famous paintings from the history of art. A series of watercolours and drawings of archaeology and landscape in Greece which he saw during a trip in 1982, have marked his recent work painted in such an energetic way that they are reminiscent of the paintings of the Neo-Expressionists (Bad Painting). In 1984, Morley was the first artist to receive the Turner Prize awarded by the Tate Gallery in London. Morley's recent painting contains many references to myths of the Old World, but even more frequently the life of the North American Indians provides the substance for his bright and colourful imagery with its unmistakable erotic allusions.
