Ciaran Murphy
Equipment
Frans Halsstraat 26, 1072 BR, Amsterdam
GRIMM is pleased to announce the third solo exhibition of Ciaran Murphy (1978, Ireland). Murphy will show a group of new oil paintings and drawings, made during his recent residency at the medical department of Trinity College, Dublin.
Over the past few years Murphy has built up a practice that uses painting and drawing as a tool to reflect upon mankind’s impulse to classify the (natural) world as a way to understand and impose order on its intangibility and mystery.
During the past few months Murphy was allowed to wander through the department of medicine in Trinity College and it is this place that provides the main source of inspiration for this exhibition. These haunting new works in this exhibition are views taken from embodied eyes as they navigate the different medical departments; from an abandoned historical collection with its weathered anatomical models, anthropological spoils and forgotten specimens, to its anatomy department with its skeletal-like amphitheatre alongside the ‘becoming obsolesce’ newer technology.
Murphy’s work is often brief titled and rendered; yet it is deceptively expansive in contextual and narrative possibilities, as if aimed at a (kind-of) shortcut between the particular and the universal. These enigmatic images display paradoxical mood that is both dark but also infused with wry humour.
Since the first solo presentation of his paintings in Dublin, 2005, Murphy’s work has achieved considerable international critical success, with solo exhibitions in Amsterdam, London, Chicago and Philadelphia and most recently in the Douglas Hyde Gallery, Dublin.