These new paintings Aileen Murphy has made over the last six months function as vessels for the fictional figures she uses to investigate the multiple possibilities of making a painting. Faces appear in some as cartoon-like heads detached and floating on the canvas, their arms reaching out beyond the bounded surface. Legs stretch across the paintings, taking the measure of the picture plane—marking their confinement and stressing their constriction.
These ambiguous figures are both created and trapped by Aileen's method of fast mark-making and slow layering. The relatively small scale acts as a way of condensing her experiments with colour in which expressive brush stokes, watery stains and ink marks are forced to merge together and commingle with the floating limbs. The effect is one of both confinement and sensuality, offering us a sense of unease and anticipation, aptly reflecting our contemporary moment.
In her distinctive approach to painting, Murphy generates imagery through a combination of slow layering and fast applications of oil paint, animating a delicate urgency and sparking sensations of both epiphany and discomfort. Fictive characters are the focal points of Murphy's paintings. The figures fluctuate under the viewer's eye, revealing and concealing themselves behind and via the materiality of the medium. The paintings have evolved through Murphy's experimental exploration of paint. In her hands, painting is an act of imaginative action—colour and gesture are live wires. The images committed to canvas arrive there through an ongoing process of reinvention. A true identity is revealed only to then conceal itself and re-emerge as something other but no less true.
Based in Farringdon, Amanda Wilkinson Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with a strong focus on female artists and artists whose work explores issues around gender. The gallery was established in 2017 by its namesake and owner Amanda Wilkinson, previously a partner in Wilkinson Gallery since 2002.
