Matthew Murphy

The Last Minute Waltz

October 20 - 31, 2008

Mather Murphy: The Last Minute Waltz

The world I depict in my paintings is one of menace and comedy. A dark vein runs through all my work, however, I never go without a stab at getting a laugh: my sense of gallows humour. Each painting is a stage for fantastical creations,a poster for an unwritten tragic-comic play.

The watercolours are painted rapidly and intuitively in loose washes, in carmine reds and shocking pinks. They use a repeated lexicon of images, mostly ones culled from human anatomy. I combine these images to create anthropomorphic figures. Drawing on my science background, their ostensibly jokey front masks a more surrealisitic concern with issues of human transformation: the mutation of cells or the metamormorphosis of body parts. Eyeballs, for instance, bloodshot for the most part, seem to morph into other organic matter or, painted in number, represent molecular compositions or swirling celestial bodies. Or, more pertinently, come to resemble strands of DNA, the building blocks of human identity.

Matthew Murphy graduated from the University of Toronto and, more recently, the Slade School of Fine Art, UCL (London) with an MFA. Now based in London, he has exhibited this year in Through a Glass Darkly, Kenny Schachter ROVE Projects (London), and at The Wyer Gallery (London) with An American Werewolf in London, his second solo show at the gallery.