JAN MURRAY

Often utilising the traditions of trompe l’oeil painting, Murray has employed a wide range of strategies to wittily explore the physical and metaphorical limits of painting as both image and object. Through her highly intricate and technically adept paintings with their striking verisimilitudes, Murray tests and ‘tricks’ the viewer in the way they see, perceive and interpret the work and its surrounds - teasing out the paradoxes inherent in both painting and looking.

Murray completed postgraduate qualifications at RMIT University and the VCA, where she was Head of Art until 2018. Since 1981 she has shown regularly in both solo and group exhibitions in public museums, commercial galleries and artist run initiatives. Her work has been included in national and international surveys of contemporary art in Australia, Germany, France, Italy and the USA, and is widely represented in significant Australian public collections as well as the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum in New York. She has received an Australia Council Project Grant and her Australia Council Residencies include Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin, Via Farini, Milan the British School at Rome. Recent residencies include Phasmid Studios, Berlin in 2016 & 2017.

Text courtesy Charles Nodrum Gallery