Ciarán Murphy: hollow daze
GRIMM is pleased to announce hollow daze, a solo exhibition of new paintings by Irish artist Ciarán Murphy, on view at the London gallery from January 22 to February 28, 2026. This will be Murphy’s second solo exhibition with the gallery in London.
Murphy’s paintings exist in fields of tension and opposition. They draw from a vast archive of found images in which hierarchies have been collapsed, and motifs with different referents are spliced together, dissolving distinct subject matter into complex compositions
In much of Murphy’s work, there is a sense of word play, both within the images themselves, their titles, and indeed the title of the exhibition itself. As a mutation of the word ‘holiday’, the title alludes to the feeling within some works of a travelogue, a diary of fleeting events that have met the artist’s gaze, while the idea of a ‘hollow daze’ suggests a feeling of disorientation, the dizzying effect of a world saturated with images.
Stone heads, rendered mute through their very medium, sit uneasily with jumbled letters, as if frozen before they can coalesce in a recognisable form of sense-making. The eyes of these statues are also glazed over, devoid of irises and pupils, the dead-eyed stare of an immortalised Roman emperor. Indeed, throughout the exhibition, different forms of gaze are examined. Besides, these sightless alabaster eyes are real eyes, either closed or struggling to see, shielded by the hand that blocks out the sun, or encouraged to rest by the nursing hand that sits on the forehead.
Another hand is shown to hold two sprigs of dried foliage, positioned aloft in front of the glass window of an airport viewing deck, a plane stationed beyond. The tensions within this painting, and in Murphy’s practice more generally, play with this sense of shifting proximities; finding a delicate interspace between what can be captured and what's fleeting. The paintings speak of and acknowledge the fragmented and disordered nature of our shared visual economy, whilst allowing this fragmentation to coalesce into a singular approach that unites each of the paintings.
This new body of work follows on from his major museum solo exhibition Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily at Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (IE); The Model, Sligo (IE), in 2022 and Butler Gallery, Kilkenny (IE), in 2021.
About the Artist
Ciarán Murphy 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.
Solo exhibitions include this appear, GRIMM, London (UK); Solid Gone, GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, Butler Gallery, Kilkenny; The Model, Sligo and Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (IE); 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, Cerealart, Philadelphia, PA (US); and Ciarán Murphy, Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago, IL (US).
His work is in the collections of the AkzoNobel Art Foundation, Amsterdam (NL); the Arts Council of Ireland, Dublin (IE); The David and Indrė Roberts Collection, London (UK); Defares Collection, Amsterdam (NL); Irish Museum of Modern Art (IMMA), Dublin (IE); MOVE, Amsterdam (NL); Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar (NL) and Sanders Collection, Haarlem (NL) among others.
