Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union
Installation Shots From: Gaiety Is the Most Outstanding Feature of the Soviet Union

Ivan Morley

SELECTED WORKS BY Ivan Morley

Ivan Morley
Tehachepi (Sic)

2009

Oil, wax, KY Jelly, thread and dye on linen

145 x 135 cm

Ivan Morley
A True Tale

2006

Thread on canvas

271.8 x 99.1 cm

Ivan Morley describes his paintings as “poetic myth objects”. Drawing from the Wild West ancestry of his hometown in California, Morley’s works – which range from folk-style illustration to full-fledged abstraction – combine fact and more than a little historical embellishment in their narrative motifs. Using such unorthodox materials as thread, glass, fabric, batik, soap, and KY Jelly, Morley uses the associative and ‘make do’ qualities of his media to give authenticity to his work as handcrafted ‘artefacts’. Morley’s A True Tale is a monumental embroidered wall-hanging. Depicting an ‘impressionistic’ view of a romantic frontier landscape through home-craft, Morley draws upon the connotations of the American sublime, his painting becoming an inspiring testimony to heartfelt endeavour and heartland chintz.

Ivan Morley
Tehachepi

2006

Oil and cotton over aluminum panel

238.8 x 116.8 cm

Ivan Morley’s Tehachepi takes its title from the name of a small town near Fresno California, in which a ranch was recently purchased to be the site of a Norbertine convent; a true contemporary story, which in Morley’s hands harks back to the days of untamed savage territories yet to be conquest. Rendered over the lustrous sheen of aluminium sheeting, Morley’s abstract pattern is made from cloth and oil paint. Rendered with comic detail, each round form is given anthropomorphic effect. Idiosyncratic and naïve, his TexMex coloured swatches flock in huddled congregation, each an intrinsic, yet individual value of the whole.

ARTICLES

Ivan Morley at Kimmerich
January 18th, 2010, by Alice Gregory, IDIOM

Recently transplanted from Düsseldorf to TriBeCa, Dennis Kimmerich opened his new gallery, Kimmerich, on Thursday, January 14th with a show of paintings by Ivan Morley. Especially bright, with a 16-foot, pressed tin ceiling and hardwood floors, the space is far from Chelsea, in both geography and feel. Kimmerich spent months traversing downtown, block by block, until he found the qualities they were looking for. TriBeCa, with its various architectural styles and mixture of commercial and residential buildings – many of them historic – is perhaps a less homogenous destination than Chelsea. The neighborhood is famously home to many art collectors who can both look and buy close to home. With apexart just around the corner, Kimmerich is well-positioned in a burgeoning gallery neighborhood.
Kimmerich’s ambiance, redolent of a long-gone and much-mythologized SoHo, seems an appropriate setting for the paintings of Ivan Morley, an artist, who, in the past, has likened his work to “souvenirs of a fictional as well as an actual place.” His charged, symbolic images, often layered atop each other, evoke embellished memories and edited nightmares. Of the eight, multimedia paintings – hair, thread and leather sneak their way in – two are on fragmented, asymmetrical canvases, a chaotic, formal alteration to match the content.

The cumulative affect of Morley’s palette is unexpected. Matte and almost chalky, each color, taken on its own, is almost aggressively “classy”; they resemble the muted hues of designer house paint. But when paired, the combination is grimy, like an urban beach: graffitied and littered with trash. Morley outlines his forms with contrasting light and dark, a technique that lends a cartoonish quality to the self-consciously stoner-y images: birds of prey, beer steins, decapitated fat men.
It’s a time-worn fallacy to assume art that appears effortless is, that quick-looking gestures are. Some of Morley’s details seem to move preemptively to counter this assumption, leading one to wonder after Morley’s own assumptions for his audience. Swaths of tooled leather, strands of woven blond hair and patches of embroidery attempt to temper the paintings’ freneticism and immunize them to the charge of sloppiness.

In theory, lines so bold and images so hawkish require the intricacies of craft and delicacy for balance, but in person, the two visions frequently negate each other. Good “bad art” is arguably the most difficult to execute, perhaps the most ineffable of aesthetic talents. Like with any expression of methodical carelessness – artfully messy hair, unbuttoned dinner parties, casual diction – bad art can be very good or very bad. There’s little worse than bad art that strives to be good on its own ground and fails. Morley’s hesitations are what create the queasiness here, as he compensates for a risk he seems unwilling – or perhaps unable – to take.

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Source:idiommag.com

Ivan Morley
April 26th, 2010, by Janet Koplos, Art In America

NEW YORK In his first New York outing, Los Angeles painter Ivan Morley, who has been showing in Santa Monica and in Europe for the last decade, offered his distinctive blend of palpability and palaver in eight works dated 2008 or ’09. The titles of these playfully inventive paintings, and the fact that they’re repeated, suggest that there is a narrative, even when the work is entirely abstract. For example, the show included two works called A True Tale. The one dated 2008 is a big vertical (103 by 39 inches) that, atypically, consists entirely of patches of machine-embroidered color on canvas, the threads wispy like dry brushstrokes at the edge of each color area. The one dated 2009 is a sizable horizontal with more sharply defined blocks as well as two patches of patterns, both with fruity-looking circles over landscape-like rectangles in a combination that recalls kitchen wallpaper. The materials here are still primarily thread on canvas, but the canvas is stretched over wood and the surface is embellished with oil paint, wax and KY Jelly.
Another repeated title is Tehachepi (sic). There were three of those, all with imagery that provokes curiosity but clarifies nothing. One features a masked obese woman, breasts exposed; another centers on a lobster. The third consists of a mushroom cloud made up of what look like purple intestines, tangles of yellow yarn and silver belt buckles (I’m guessing here), above which appear two foamy pitchers of beer and either a motorcycle cap or a German officer’s cap. The style falls somewhere between Goth comics and Max Beckmann. The materials contribute to the impact: this piece is painted with oil, wax and KY Jelly on tooled and dyed leather in an irregular shape that resembles a three-part folding screen. The title, a little Googling suggests, might be due to the fact that the California town of Tehachapi has spelled its name four ways, but what that has to do with the imagery remains an amusing mystery.
Morley also teases with text, as in the painting Collateral, where the words “Clyfford Still Real Estate” emerge from a muddled background, looking tangible and battered, like an old business sign in a cartoon. It turns out that understanding Collateral, as well as an irregular-shaped abstraction called Don, George, Diane and some other works, is enhanced by hints in a section of the artist’s website called Anecdotes. Although the anecdotes consist mostly of non sequitur sentences, they extend the sense that Morley is drawing upon whatever fascinates him—a story, a substance, an artist—and pulling elements together into painting/objects that maintain their own quirky identity but allow plenty of scope for the viewer’s participatory imagining. Morley is based in the land of Hollywood fantasy, yet his thinking seems shaped more by the Brothers Grimm.

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Source: artinamericamagazine.com

Ivan Morley: Patrick Painter
By Meghan Dailey

Ivan Morley's paintings are inspired by the frontiersman's lore of scrappy, dried-out California towns with names like San Gabriel, El Monte, and Tehachapi. Such locales and their all-but-forgotten (and possibly artist-fabricated) histories--if you can call tales of memorable cockfights and observations on the behavior of squirrels histories-seem unlikely sources of inspiration.
Yet, from a mass of myth, a dose of his own vivid imagination, and a range of raw material, Morley has created some mighty idiosyncratic pictures. The show as a whole was pulled together with a keen sense of detail, with texts telling a few of the stories rendered carefully on the walls.
To create his paintings, Morley applies dyed fabric, wax, varnish, dense patches of colored thread, and, occasionally, oil paint to a range of supports that includes denim, glass, linen, and canvas. Sometimes he paints on glass, peels the image off, and affixes it to another support.
The textures and varying opacities of these surfaces contribute to the work's material diversity; we get blocky quiltlike patterns, floral motifs, and faux-naif, cartoonish illustrations on tie-dyed grounds. Slipped into the mix are some Indonesian-style batiks, which Morley says he learned about from LA stoner culture.

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Source: findarticles.com