New York City.- The Sue Scott Gallery is proud to present “Malcolm Morley: Another Way to Make an Image, Monotypes”, on view at the gallery from January 11th through February 19th 2012. Since 2006, Malcolm Morley has made over twenty-five monotypes and monoprints with One Eye Pug. Despite being an accomplished printmaker who had made numerous other types of prints, this body of work was Morley’s first foray into the monotype medium. Morley uses the monotype medium not as a staid or simplistic process of transference, but rather as an investigation of how the pressure of a press affects imagery. In each monotype, Morley pushed experimentation, never using the exact same technique twice.
In Rushing to Miami, 2006, printed with master printer Kathy Carracio, he used Mylar as the plate on which to paint the exotic and colorful kites floating above a tropical setting. The Mylar caused the watercolor to pool in areas resulting in porcelain like quality that he could not have achieved on the more porous surface of paper. After going through the press, the full, colorful image was transferred to the paper while simultaneously staining the Mylar, resulting in a ghost image on the plate that did not appear on the paper. Not for the last time, the artist blurred the line between print and original. Working with master printer Maurice Sanchez, Morley also experimented with a hydraulic press. In a progression entitled Abandon Ship, 2008, Sanchez took the plate through the press nine times, with each resulting image a lighter version of the previous one. Realizing he needed to outline the images, Morley made a drawing outlining the images in black and Sanchez ran a single lithograph over each monotype, again questioning definitions.
Technically, a monoprint begins with a printed matrix off which the image is built – Morley reverses the process, by “drawing” on top of the image.Much of Morley’s work is autobiographical. For example, Red Shoes with Palette, 2007 came out of his time spent volunteering at a local Boys and Girls Club. Morley instructed his students to draw a favorite item, like their tennis shoes, and felt he should do the same. Here the artist juxtaposes a messy, well-used watercolor palette next to the shoes, a reminder of the artifice of the image.Born in London in 1931, Malcolm Morley studied at the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts and the Royal College of Art. In 1958 he moved to the United States and in 1984 he was awarded the inaugural Turner Prize for British artists. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and
Letters, American Academy of Arts and Sciences and a recipient of the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture Painting Award in 1992. Morley first achieved widespread recognition in the 1960s for his super-realist paintings and again in the eighties for his masterful NeoExpressionist works. Morley’s work is in public and private collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Museum of Modern Art New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden; National Gallery of Art, Washington DC; Tate, London; and Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid
Sue Scott founded Sue Scott Gallery in 2008, bringing 25 years of experience as a curator, writer and art consultant to the gallery. As an Adjunct Curator of Contemporary Art at the Orlando Museum of Art for nineteen years, she curated solo exhibitions of the works of Bryan Hunt, Jane Hammond, Suzanne McCelland, Katherine Bowling, Frank Moore, Kerry James Marshall, Jennifer Bartlett and Alex Katz, among others. Group exhibitions by Scott include Proof Positive: Forty Years of Printmaking at ULAE at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Witness Theories of Seduction for Dorsky Curatorial Programs, and The Edward R. Broida Collection: A Selection of Works for the Orlando Museum of Art. In 2005, she established One Eye Pug, a publishing company specializing in contemporary monotypes. She is a co-author, along with Helaine Posner, Eleanor Heartney and Nancy Princenthal of the award-winning book After the Revolution: Women Who Transformed Contemporary Art (2007), and with One Eye Pug, co-published with Hard Press Editions, Suzanne McClelland: rock and shift (2008). Visit the gallery’s website at … http://www.suescottgallery.com