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Ciarán Murphy | Solid Gone
14 January – 5 March, 2022
Keizersgracht 241, Amsterdam (NL)
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The exhibition debuts new paintings by Ciarán Murphy that reflect the artist's long-standing attempt to grapple with a world completely saturated with pictures that are overbearing yet irresistible, entrancing yet anxiety provoking. These images exert an almost spectral presence, blurring temporalities and indeed our very notions of what constitutes reality.
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The title Solid Gone references the various paradoxes seen throughout the exhibition. There is a persistent playing with binaries, taking aim at the imperceptible boundary between presence and absence, the familiar and the strange, the dead and the alive, stillness and motion. Certain subjects depicted can be identified, but some are on the verge of slipping back into nothingness. Some are recognizable but somehow made strange, while others are more ambiguous yet strangely familiar. Painted images do not move but these are pictures in motion, still becoming. Thus, present throughout the exhibition is the ambient hum of digital screens, evidence of car journeys, terrestrial terrains, animal classifications, fragmented bodies about to disappear, in motion or floating. Gravity does not quite hold or is in flux.
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Ciarán Murphy's work constitutes a quiet, singular inquiry into the possibilities of untangling representation from reality, or, if such an untangling is even possible, grappling with the conundrums that are inherent to representation. The artist’s work raises questions about the strange realm we might call subjectivity proper, the zone that is outside or perhaps in excess of symbolic limits, and aims to locate coordinates, in a world that is increasingly lacking in them.
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For enquiries regarding the featured works or for more information,
please email enquiry@grimmgallery.com
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About the artist
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 recently had a solo exhibition at the Butler Gallery in Kilkenny (IE) titled Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily. The exhibition will travel to the Model Arts Centre, Sligo (IE) from January 23 to March 6, 2022 and will conclude at the Royal Hibernian Academy in Dublin (IE) from September 9 to October 23, 2022.
Other solo exhibitions include Ciarán Murphy at GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL) in 2007; Ciarán Murphy at Kavi Gupta Gallery, Chicago (US) and Ciarán Murphy at Cerealart, Philadelphia (US), in 2008; All That’s Air Melts Into Solid at GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL) in 2010; The Paradise at Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (IE) in 2013; A particular nothing at GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL); A Round Now at Taymour Grahne, New York (US) in 2014; Plainsight at GRIMM, Amsterdam (NL) and Hundreds of Nature at GRIMM, New York (US) in 2018. Murphy has participated in group shows at Gallery Massimo Carassi, Milan (IT) in 2006; Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin (IE) and the Royal Hibernian Academy, Dublin (IE) in 2011; as well as the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (IE) in 2013, and 2017, respectively.
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