Gentle And Violent - Michael Gurhy

About

Francis Morris (Head of Collections International Art, Tate Modern) and Enrique Juncosa (Director, Irish Museum of Modern Art) both agreed that Michael Gurhy’s work “is small-scale work but potent in terms of emotion. His work addresses youth culture but evokes a knowledge of the unforeseen, of premonition”.   

The Nunnery Gallery is pleased to present a new body of work by London based artist Michael Gurhy. The exhibition, supported by Arts Council England, has been created over the past several months during lockdown and marks a shift in the artists practice towards the making of sculptural based objects while still incorporating more familiar mediums such as print, drawing, painting and a collaged photograph of the artist's parents

The exhibition features work made in various materials, shifting between made, altered and found objects –we are often unsure which is which. Deceptive bronze-like sculptures such as Juvenescence, The Balance of Things and Loves Executioner seem familiar to us in their reference to precious relics and sacred objects one might expect to find inside a Church or Cathedral. On closer inspection however we see that the visual language of religious iconography is disrupted and reimagined through the incorporation of fetishised objects, personal artefacts and fairytale imagery that would not look out of place in Angelas Carter’s The Bloody Chamber.

“I incorporate into the work images of catholicism such as the cross and the Virgin Mary which were prevalent during my childhood in Ireland. By challenging their symbolic meaning outside of a religious setting, the deconstruction and reimagining of religious meaning becomes an investigation into the family unit, and a way for me to make sense of and to reclaim my own narrative”.

The artists interest in psychoanalytic theory, and its ability to release repressed emotions and experiences by making the unconscious conscious, echoes throughout Gurhy’s work. These works could be easily categorised between Freuds two fundamental drives of Eros (The life instinct, which include sexual instincts, the drive to live, and basic instinctual impulses such as thirst and hunger) and Thanatos (the drive of aggression, sadism, destruction, violence, and death) most evident in pieces such as The beauty of Survival, a bath filled with dyed Gypsophila (baby’s breath) and resin dedicated to the artists Mother and her battle with a terminal illness. Quietus, a piece that incorporates three birds cast in stone and laying belly up on concrete blocks serves as a Memento Mori to the viewer of our own fragility and of our eventual extinction.

The shift from adolescence to adulthood, sexual awakening and unconscious desire is reflected in pieces such as Nocturnus, Rites of Passage and Eros. While the painting Salvatore and the photo collage  Oh Mom and Dad speak of Redemption, Trauma doesn’t like to be Touched and Permission, Submission, Contrition speak more to the shadow side of the psyche.

“I want to leave these pieces open to the viewers interpretation, although for me they are deeply personal and perhaps served as the most cathartic works to make, an over explanation would kill their accessibility, I want the viewer to project onto these works their own meaning”.

Influenced by artists such as Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin whose works are known for their emotionally violent and raw autobiographical narratives, Gurhy’s work operates from this same space activating psychological responses from the viewer with access to the work on many levels from the purely visual to the deeply personal.