Ciarán Murphy Born 1978, Mayo (IE)
Lives and works in Callan (IE)

In Ciarán Murphy’s paintings we encounter an unsettling array of familiar and unfamiliar forms; sticks, rocks, Martian landscapes, insects, interiors, hands, letters, blank screens, architectural features and geometric shapes. Objects seem in varying states of flux: things float, are in the midst of changing form, while other things are barely there, entirely absent, or in various states of becoming. They all seem to have in one way or another a vexed relationship to gravity. The paintings capture a sense of place through fragments, charting the artist’s exploration of a familiar landscape along with associated perceptions, highlights, and memories.

Murphy’s paintings can be understood as an effort to deal with the fact that we live in a world where images are omnipresent, exerting an almost ghostly or spectral presence in our everyday existence. Temporalities are increasingly blurred and our very notions of what constitutes reality is a process mediated by images. Murphy’s work grapples with the idea of untangling representation from reality, if such an untangling is even possible.

Ciarán Murphy (b. 1978 in Mayo, IE) received his BA at the National College of Art & Design, Dublin (IE) in 2003 and his MA in Visual Arts Practices (MAVIS), IADT, Dublin (IE) in 2005. Murphy has a museum solo exhibition at The Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin forthcoming titled Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily opening in November 2020. Other solo exhibitions include, there, there now, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); Hundreds of Nature, GRIMM, New York, NY (US); Plainsight, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); A Round Now, Taymour Grahne Gallery, New York, NY (US); The Paradise, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (IE); All That’s Air Melts Into Solid, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); Ciarán Murphy, Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (IE); March, Mother’s Tankstation, Dublin (IE); Ciarán Murphy at Cerealart, Philadelphia, PA (US); and Ciarán Murphy, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL (US). His work is in the collections of the Arts Council of Ireland, Dublin (IE); the Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin (IE); and the Sanders Collection, Haarlem (NL), among others.