Ciarán Murphy | Solid Gone

14 January –  5 March, 2022

Keizersgracht 241, Amsterdam (NL)

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. 

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.

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.

For enquiries regarding the featured works or for more information,

please email enquiry@grimmgallery.com