NEW YORK, NY.- Taymour Grahne Gallery presents A Round Now, a selection of new oil paintings and watercolors by acclaimed Irish artist Ciarán Murphy, marking the artist’s first exhibition in New York.
Murphy’s 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 over the years. This previously unseen archive forms the backbone that haunts the finished works. Through a process of editing, erasing, overwriting or simply replacing what has been painted and unpainted, the work leaves a sense that is not quite of loss, or absence, but rather the presence of a non-thing. Recently, the subjects within his paintings have become more obscured and elusive. The recognizable forms in his earlier work have given way to indeterminate shapes and architectural forms. Although some might be described as abstract, they still feel as if they are, at some point, photographically derived and “indexically tied to some frozen instant that existed before the painting,” as Chris Fite Wassilak writes in the catalog essay “Documentary.” The sense of dislocation or unease that comes from experiencing Murphy’s work isn’t located in any single image, rather it is an accumulated sense that grows while walking amongst a gathering of his paintings. This perpetual feeling of dislocation ensures that the viewer can never institute any prospect of having ‘arrived’ or feeling ‘at home.’
Art critic Luke Clancy refers to Murphy’s paintings as spectral images; “His ghost shapes and almost disintegrating (or never even forming) objects come from a place into which we are all heading. They are speculative paintings in that they share with speculative fictions an ability to peer imaginatively into a future and in the act of looking, call that speculation into being. In this, the paintings propose a way to explore figuratively the limits of our understanding, to offer objects that undermine our understanding of objects, objects that dramatize our expectations not just of comprehension, but of sensing.”
A 48-page publication designed by Peter Maybury with catalogue essays by critics Luke Clancy and Chris Fite Wassilak accompanies this exhibition.
Since the first solo presentation of Murphy’s paintings in Dublin in 2005, his work has achieved considerable international critical success, with solo exhibitions in Kavi Gupta Gallery Chicago, Grimm Gallery Amsterdam, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin, Zoo Art Fair, London. Upcoming exhibitions include ‘The Line of Beauty’ in The Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin ‘Paradise Series’ Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin. His paintings are held in many public and private collections through out the world. The artist currently resides and works in County Cork, Ireland.
