He had a troubled childhood—after his home was partially blown up by a bomb during World War II, his family was homeless for a time.

[2] He would later look back on these rough beginnings with some humor: "I [feel] very sorry for artists that haven't had much happen in their early life," he once said.

He moved there the following year, after which he met artists including Barnett Newman, Cy Twombly, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol.

The Whitechapel Gallery, in London, organized a major retrospective exhibition in 1983, resulting in his winning the inaugural Turner Prize, awarded by the Tate, in 1984.

'"[10] The following year, he bought a Methodist church in Bellport, Long Island, New York State, where he would reside for the remainder of his life.

He was the subject of museum exhibitions at venues including Tate Liverpool (1991); the Musée National d'Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1993); Fundación La Caixa, Madrid (1995); the Hayward Gallery, London (2001); and the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford (2013–14).

[11] Morley's earliest work upon leaving art school, while remaining in England, adopted traditional, naturalist styles of painting.

He also met Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and, influenced in part by them, made the drastic change to a photorealist style (Morley preferred the phrase Superrealist).

"[2] He would adopt this as his style for a few years, transposing images from a variety of sources (travel brochures, calendars, old paintings) to canvas.

"[2] The artist turned to new subjects, including mythology and the Classical world, in his work of the 1980s, giving his paintings titles like Aegean Crime (1987), Cradle of Civilization with American Woman (1982),[12][13] Farewell to Crete,[14] and Black Rainbow Over Oedipus at Thebes (1988) and depicting Minoan figures; travel to the United States also resulted in prominent use of Native American kachina dolls and other motifs from those cultures.

Similar expressionist brushwork and subject matter by artists such as Julian Schnabel, Eric Fischl, Georg Baselitz, and Anselm Kiefer resulted in curators identifying a "neo-Expressionist" movement, in which they included him, although he disliked the label.

[15] The artist also returned to the "catastrophes" that were among his early subjects, depicting car crashes (including one showing the crash that resulted in the death of auto racing star Dale Earnhardt), the aftermath of the War in Afghanistan, and the collapse of a building in Brooklyn, among other subjects.

In the last decade of his life, Morley continued to depict early- and mid-twentieth-century fighter planes, as well as the pilots who flew them during World Wars I and II, including the legendary flying ace Manfred von Richthofen, the "Red Baron."