Ivan Morley (b. 1966, Burbank, California) combines virtuosic craftsmanship, deep knowledge of the discipline of painting, and a committed sense of place, creating works that take on the medium’s major narratives even as they glorify its minor pathways. For twenty-five years he has made works that challenge expectations about how paintings should be made and what they should depict. He works in series, some of which span the entirety of his career and are ongoing; his most long-standing typology is produced by painting an underlayer in watercolor and slowly building onto the canvas with thread, focusing on small, embroidery-ring-sized sections at a time, so that the completed work isn’t revealed to the artist until the end of the process. Looking, therefore, becomes secondary to the act of building or constructing an image on a micro scale. Morley layers form, color, and material to create paintings that are as much object as they are rendered image, employing the language of stylistic and compositional pastiche to reflect the constellated facts—and their fictional counterpoints—that inform our fraught understandings of time and place, and especially the layered histories of his native California.

Ivan Morley has been the subject of solo exhibitions at venues including David Kordansky Gallery, New York (2025) and Los Angeles (2022 and 2018); Bortolami Gallery, New York (2021 and 2016) and Kimmerich Galerie, Berlin (2014). Group exhibitions include Abstract America Today, Saatchi Gallery, London (2014); Painting Expanded, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York (2011); The Artist’s Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2010); DAS GESPINST, Die Sammlung Schürmann zu Besuch im Museum Abteiberg, Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach, Germany (2009); Imagination Becomes Reality, Part IV: Borrowed Images, Sammlung Goetz, Munich (2006); and Painting in Tongues, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (2006). His work is in the permanent collections of institutions including Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (K21), Düsseldorf, Germany; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and University Museum of Contemporary Art at the Fine Arts Center, University of Massachusetts Amherst. In 2020, the first comprehensive monograph dedicated to Morley was published by David Kordansky Gallery and Bortolami Gallery. Morley lives and works in Los Angeles and Big Sur, CA.