These works reflect the artist’s long-standing attempt to grapple with a contemporary world that is completely saturated with images. Images that embody the paradoxical status of being both completely over-bearing, yet irresistible, both entrancing and anxiety-provoking.
They exert an almost ghostly weightless presence, blurring past, present and future; and indeed our very notions of what constitutes reality.
Murphy’s work constitutes a quiet, singular inquiry into the possibilities of untangling representation from reality or if such an untangling is even possible, grappling with the conundrums that are inherent to representation, that strange realm we might call subjectivity proper, that zone that is outside or in excess of symbolic limits, an effort to find some coordinates, in a world increasingly lacking in them.
Artist Bio:
Born in Mayo, Murphy lives and works in Kilkenny. His enigmatic paintings take their starting point
from a wide-ranging and ever-growing archive of images found, collected and carefully arranged into
categories by the artist. He received his BA from NCAD, Dublin in 2003, and his MA in Visual Arts
Practices (MAVIS) from IADT, Dublin in 2005.
Images:
1/2. Ciarán Murphy, Kind of blueish, 2021, oil on canvas 70 x 90 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Gallery. Photographer, Brian Creegan.2/2. Ciarán Murphy, Solid gone 2, 2021, oil on canvas 30 x 40 cm. Image courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Gallery. Photographer, Brian Creegan
