Malcolm Morley with his 1984 Turner Prize installation
© Tate photography
After trying in 1964 to paint a ship from real life Morley turned to photographs of ships, which he copied in a meticulous trompe l’oeil style with the aid of a grid. These marked the beginning of Photorealism in the USA, although Morley preferred the term Super Realism. Replicating the original in an almost mechanical way and conceiving of the painting simply as a coloured surface, Morley undermined the distinction between the abstract and the figurative.