Ivan Morley
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Ivan Morley (born 1966, Burbank, US) is an artist based in Los Angeles.
Morley’s work has been exhibited in a number of exhibitions including “Paintland” at Lemon Sky Project Space[1] in Hollywood, “Buffet” at Contemporary Arts Collective in Las Vegas and “Looking at Painting II” at Galerie Tanit[2] in Munich. He has shown internationally at museums and galleries such as the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art[3], Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen[4] in Dusseldorf and Bernier/Eliades[5] in Athens. He is represented by Patrick Painter[6] in Los Angeles.
Ivan Morley can loosely be described as a painter. He uses such a wide variety of media and surfaces that the term hardly seems adequate, and this combined with the idiosyncratic working methods he employs to arrive at a narrative starting-point for his work means the fact that Morley paints is simply part of a much wider-ranging practice.
Morley uses scraps of stories and tall-tales from his native California’s dustier outposts, where everything still has a feel of the ‘good old days’ – when men were men, there was land to work and buffalo to hunt – and makes paintings that range from pattern-emblazoned abstract landscapes to wildlife caricatures with a punchline. Morley’s work is to be found on materials ranging from fabric to glass, often ‘painted’ with wax, grease and thread. Occasionally exhibited alongside the stories that, true or false. inspired the work, Morley’s paintings pay respect to the passing of time and the trickiness of historical accuracy through both their potentially murky narrative motivations and their deceptive transformations of everyday materials into records of artistic activity.
