Ciarán Murphy

About

GRIMM is pleased to present still, weight, thing, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Irish artist Ciarán Murphy this December. This will be artist's second exhibition at the New York gallery and his first at the gallery's current Tribeca location.

Ciarán Murphy’s practice grapples with the saturated, albeit fragmented, state of the image economy and the various paradoxes therein. The title of the exhibition, still, weight, thing underscores an interest in the cross-sections of visual language, where alternative meaning hovers just beyond the forefront of understanding. The artist’s representations dissolve, reappear, and coalesce in a manner that suggests a very human, cognitive observation, contrasting with the credible, and thus predictable, nature of technological or mechanical image making.

These tensions are explored through various dichotomies within the paintings. The work sonomus places its image of a bird atop grey ‘noise’, exacerbating the push and pull between foreground and background. The painting windworld presents a set of arms that at once rest heavy yet float in isolation, weightless, in the picture plane. Both portait and moon day hover between absence and presence, lending themselves to another shared commonality across Murphy’s work: an evasive nature with subjects that refuse to be captured. Zebras rush into and out of the canvas in herd just as the driver in drive there appears partially withheld but persists forward.

In the essay titled Earth’s Echo, published by the Royal Hibernian Academy of Arts, Dublin (IE) on the occasion of Murphy’s 2022 solo exhibition Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, writer Dan Fox states: 

“The word ‘dreamlike’ would be an easy adjective to reach for. However, that would make me wonder how a physical, tangible thing in the world, such as a painting on a wall, could be compared to the intangible, gossamer blooms of the subconscious. A dream vanishes. A painting remains on the wall.“ The artist explores “the moment of cognition, the instant that the sense of a thing emerges from a sea of marks and colors.”