Between: i. murphy

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Saturday, 3 September 2022

Artlyst - Spiritual Joseph Beuys Plus More: September Diary

My latest diary piece for A rtlyst has mentions of Joseph Beuys, Mathias Goeritz, Wallace Berman, David Miller, Idris Murphy, Colin McCahon, Yvette Coppersmith, Roger Kemp and Vasily Kandinsky:

‘Telushkin concludes by sharing a portion of a letter written by Kandinsky in 1913 where he “mused about the similar avenues of rupture and rebirth that religion and art offer”:

“Art in many respects resembles religion. Its development consists not of new discoveries that obliterate old truths and stamp them as false (as is apparently the case in science). Its development consists in moments of sudden illumination, resembling a flash of lightning, of explosions that burst in the sky like fireworks, scattering a whole ‘bouquet’ of different colored stars around them. This illumination reveals with blinding clarity new perspectives … the continuing growth of earlier wisdom, which is not canceled out by the latter, but remains living and productive as truth and as wisdom. Christ, in his own words, came not to overthrow the old law, [but] he transformed the old material law into his own spiritual law. In this way, I have since come to conceive of nonobjective painting not as a negation of all previous art. I have always been put out by assertions that I intended to overthrow the old tradition of such painting.”

Kandinsky’s argument regarding the synergies between developments in religion and those in art might just be a thread connecting all those artists and movements that have been considered in this piece.'

See here for my review of David Miller's 'Some Other Shadows'.

My other pieces for Artlyst are:

Interviews -

Articles -

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David Miller and SpiritWORK - Voice.

Saturday, 20 June 2020

Exhibitions update

With the easing of lockdown in many countries, exhibitions are beginning to be mounted again while online exhibitions are also proliferating. Here is my roundup of exhibitions that have caught my attention:

Unleavened is a show which opened at the Dyman Gallery in Stellenbosch shortly before the Covid-19 lock-down and which has subsequently gone online. Unleavened is organised by 40 Stones, a group committed to curating exhibitions which display the rich connections between art and faith. They suggest that leaven, the agent that causes dough to rise, provides a metaphor through which to view the work of young artists as they explore the presence and impact of culture, gender, politics and religion in their lives today.

Caravan's To Heal The World is an international online artistic reflection on mending the brokenness of our global family. Caravan believe that artists are natural change agents and can lead the way. This exhibition is a visual expression by artists about mending the brokenness of our global family, as well as of their desire to repair our world through art itself. 119 qualifying artwork submissions were received through a global open call, and an independent jury selected 30 artworks for the exhibition.

Impact is a new 3D online art exhibition from Chaiya Art Awards where 60 UK artists explore the impact of Covid 19, around the world, on families, society, health care and beliefs. This curated exhibition features sculpture, painting, drawing, video, photography and mixed media artwork. Artists are giving from 30-100% of sales to designated charities to support those who are vulnerable during this pandemic.

Mitchell Fine Art is presenting a vibrant exhibition from an artist born in the remote centre of Australia in the late 1920’s – Kudditji Kame Kngwarreye. Originally a stockman and a miner, Kudditji Kngwarreye did not start painting until the 1980’s. Utilising bold compositions, Kngwarreye manipulated colour and form in highly emotive depictions of his ancestral homelands in Central Australia. Painting without a predetermined perspective, Kngwarreye’s paintings are visceral and spontaneous and evoke feelings for and connection to country. ‘As an artist he was without inhibition. To compliment the exhibition, Mitchell Fine Art has invited Sydney artist Idris Murphy to curate a response to Kudditji Kngwarreye's paintings through his own work.A renowned Australian artist, Idris Murphy is known for his gestural paintings that depict his intimate awareness and a passionate attachment to the Australian landscape. Idris Murphy continuously refers to inspiration drawn from Aboriginal artists and the holistic experience of the land.

Leaves of Grass at Page Galleries features a selection of works on paper from Max Gimblett’s archive. There is an onslaught of vibrant, riotous colour, pattern, and texture in these works. Great swathes of colour – yellow, purple, pink – inch out to the edge of the paper and beyond. There is a sense of release, freedom. This exhibition borrows its title from a collection of poetry by American poet Walt Whitman (1819–1892). While the first edition of Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, Whitman spent most of his life writing and re-writing the collection. Gimblett himself is constantly revising, revisiting. In these works we see the familiar motif of the quatrefoil, the wheel; subjects Gimblett returns to again and again, each repetition lending new life to their form. And like Whitman, whose poem I Sing the Body Electric exalts the human body and its relation to the soul, Gimblett aligns the mind and body through his practice, drawing on philosophies of Zen Buddhism rather than the traditional western division of mind-body dualism.

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Valerie June - Cosmic Dancer.

Friday, 2 January 2015

A listening gaze: Paul Martin and Idris Murphy

Edgelands is an exhibition of new work by Paul Martin and Idris Murphy at The Warburton Gallery:

'Idris Murphy and Paul Martin, who exhibit together here for the first time, met in London at the age of 22; they met again in Perth, Western Australia at 65, a meeting which planted the seed for this show. The intervening years were spent painting and making, teaching and learning, seeking an understanding of the nature of nature and a sense of which what Martin has called“the gritty sacredness of places and things” ...

Paul Martin’s most recent exhibition was in part inspired by his reading of Rilke, who wrote that “in order for a Thing to speak to you, you must regard it for a certain time as the only one that exists, as the one and only phenomenon, which through your laborious and exclusive love is now placed at the centre of the universe”. Idris Murphy, in the introduction to his 2013 show Everywhen, quoted the words attributed to the 1st century churchman Ignatius of Antioch: “We each carry our own depth of silence, a human kind of silence, not found anywhere else…silence is a presence, a receptivity, a readiness, a waiting, a listening.” It is perhaps here that Murphy and Martin find their greatest point of convergence, in the understanding that the environmental challenges we face necessitate our developing this readiness and receptivity, this capacity for concentration, for laborious and exclusive love, this ability to regard nature with a steadiness of gaze that we might equate with the aesthetic gaze, and that this, ultimately, might be what constitutes the work of art.'

The works on show are complemented by a series of texts from leading Scottish and Australian writers reflecting on the ecological and environmental challenges we face across the world. This strand of the show is collated and introduced by the renowned novelist and short story writer Tim Winton.

Winton writes:

'Here are two painters who’ve learnt to look at natural forms so keenly and humbly that theirs has become, each in their own way, and in separate hemispheres, a listening gaze. Their reverent attention seems to have left them open to the steady returning stare of a creation that groans in travail even as it feeds us. The world we see in their recent work has been transformed and illuminated through their loving attention and in turn, over the decades, as artists, they have clearly been changed.'

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Midnight Oil - Dreamworld.

Saturday, 21 September 2013

Struggles to contend with the Australian landscape

Australia is "the first major survey of Australian art in the UK for 50 years, this exhibition spans more than 200 years from 1800 to the present day and seeks to uncover the fascinating social and cultural evolution of a nation through its art. Two hundred works including painting, drawing, photography, watercolours and multimedia will shed light on a period of rapid and intense change; from the impact of colonisation on an indigenous people, to the pioneering nation building of the 19th century through to the enterprising urbanisation of the last 100 years."

Anthony Gormley comments: "When I think of Sidney Nolan, Fred Williams or Arthur Boyd, I think of harsh earth and fierce sunlight. Through its new occupiers, somehow Australia produced modernist vigour ... There is a directness in the Indigenous traditions, whether the dots of the Western Desert or the colour field paintings of the Great Sandy Desert, where pigment is used to carry mineral truth as well as lived feeling."

Leading Australian contemporary landscape painter Idris Murphy has said:

"I’m not interested in negotiating my way around Indigenous painting. I think it is going to be a problem – can the Western tradition sustain a view of the world? I mean, Peter Fuller used to talk about this when he came to Australia very briefly; he saw in Fred Williams and Sidney Nolan the potential for the ‘last great hurrah’ of the Northern Romantic tradition and I think there’s a lot of truth in what he said. I think it’s going to be a problem – it’s not a problem for me – I’m just lapping it up! Of course I’m not Indigenous but I love the idea of this great wonderful European tradition, which I belong to, fusing with Indigenous art – happening right under my nose, in my lifetime! And I can see that as a whole new sort of language base for contemporary painting."

It will be interesting to see if this show gives any sense of this new sort of language base that Murphy sees in contemporary Australian art. By contrast Adrian Searle has suggested that the show is strong on Aboriginal art and full of classics – but loses its way in modern times:

"The show peters out in a parade of examples, a checklist of single works hung cheek by jowl with no real coherence. There is too much that feels secondary, or like retreads of flavour-of-the-month international fashions.

I am certainly no expert on Australian art, but even I can tell that, however enlightening parts of the earlier sections are, the show fails to give a sense of any of the more recent art except in a tokenistic way."

The Guardian does have a helpful timeline of Australian art, however: A history of Australian art – interactive timeline.

Back at the RA, author Tim Winton will explore his belief that ‘Australia the place is constantly overshadowed by Australia the national idea. Undoubtedly the nation and its projects have shaped my education and my prospects, but the degree to which geography, distance and weather have moulded my sensory palate, my imagination and expectations is substantial. Landscape has exerted a kind of force upon me that is every bit as geological as family.’

In today's Guardian, Winton selects Fred Williams's Yellow Landscape, 1968-9 as his favourite artwork from his homeland:

"he renders the scale and mystery of the physical world by tiny marks. The forms and figures are like scars in the hide of a beast too big to properly conceive of, let alone see entire. All these wens and divots are without pattern and yet they bring to mind calligraphy. These are the marks, the messy, chaotic texture that even the practised eye struggles to contend with in the Australian landscape. Whether you're seeing it from the air or at ground level, this is what your senses struggle with in the open country, such flat planes worked over with hieroglyphics born of fire, erosion, meteor showers, drought and epochal passages of time. Here humans might seem incidental."

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Midnight Oil - Dreamworld.

Saturday, 20 October 2012

Murphy, McCahon and Buber

"Idris Murphy’s extensive career as a painter has been widely lauded. Since 1988, Murphy has been Lecturer at UNSW’s College of Fine Arts, Sydney, and in 1994 received his Doctorate of Creative Arts from the University of Wollongong. Acknowledged as one of the most influential landscape painters in Australian contemporary art, his work is held in the public collections of the National Gallery of Australia, the National Library of Australia, Canberra and the Art Gallery of NSW. In 2009, following a New Zealand tour, a survey exhibition of Murphy’s work—I-Thou—was held at King Street Gallery on William and at the Hazelhurst Regional Gallery, Sydney."

Murphy said that "the things that enticed me originally to go to New Zealand: Colin McCahon, to see the land and to see what he has made of it, and from it, first hand. To somehow use it as a contrast to the desert country that I am most at home with."

John McDonald wrote: "This intense identification with the landscape can be felt everywhere in this survey. It is a relationship that comes naturally to Aboriginal artist but requires strenuous efforts on behalf of Westerners, who have to break with the pictorial habits of a lifetime. Whereas most non-indigenous artists tend to objectify the landscape, Murphy tries to fuse his own subjectivity with the mood and spirit of a place. The results are far from realistic but they are powerful and persuasive. This quest entails a leap of faith on behalf of the artist, a willingness to believe in a greater truth that lies beyond the veil of appearances. In trying to discern the atmosphere conjured up by these paintings, one might use the word “spiritual” with confidence and “mystical” with only slight embarrassment."

Murphy "titled the show I and Thou, after the small but influential book by the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber. It is a basic existentialist idea, that one only becomes “I” through understanding one’s existence in relation to an “Other”; but Buber extends this to the relationship between a human being and God, and even to his own relationship with a tree. It is the tree idea for which Murphy has a special affection. In the catalogue he quotes Buber’s words: “In considering the tree I become bound up in relation to it. The tree is no longer It.”

Murphy writes: "When looking back and considering the 'influences' on my work, several artists and writers come to mind; these may be more or less influential at any given time. There are though, certain connections that hold and seem to be continuing. Martin Buber has been one of these connections; often encountered in quotes by other writers. Buber's articulation of how we respond to the world has been seminal to my way of seeing and therefore how I 'see' my paintings. The Martin Buber connection (exemplified by McMahon's Painting I-Thou) added to my interest in the work of Colin McMahon; in particular the way in which he depicted land ... As the difference between the truth of a painting and the truth about a painting are significant. Buber's writings have for me been a way of continuing my assessment of western paradigms in painting and have added to my encounter with indigenous art."

I and Thou "is one of McCahon’s earliest ‘word’ paintings, in which words are presented as the main imagery. The words have a physical presence, appearing as three dimensional, solid forms in space, while still maintaining their linguistic function. The fracturing of the picture surface and the spatial ambiguities of the image clearly indicates the artist’s familiarity with Cubist notions of constructing space. The presentation of the words also resembles the handiwork of signwriters, whose craft had interested McCahon since youth."

"In the first ‘word paintings’ by McCahon each image is constructed in a manner best described as ‘architectural’. To compose the paintings I Am ... and I and Thou ... McCahon has rendered each phrase in block letters, achieving pictorial illusion through the restriction of colour and the placement of the words on (or in) an ambiguous background. Dating from February 1954, both images are notable for their strong vertical, linear structure.

The source for each title is clear. ‘I and Thou’ is the title of a book by the theologian Martin Buber. ‘I am’, which McCahon re-employs in several guises in later works, is drawn from Exodus 3:4–6:

‘Then Moses said to God, “if I go to the Israelites and tell them that the God of their forefathers has sent me to them, and they ask me his name, what shall I say?” God answered “I AM that is who I am. Tell them I AM has sent you to them.”’

Of course in McCahon’s painting of this name, an ambiguity is present. For while the ‘I’ in ‘I AM’ is the God of the Old Testament, it is also possible to read it as a statement of affirmation by McCahon, who with these words reasserts himself as an artist.

In respect of the work I and Thou 1954, critic Francis Pound has a further suggestion – that the ‘I’ is floating around in Cubist space because everything is still unclear: a New Zealand culture has not yet been formed. The ‘I’ moves around in time and space.!"

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I And Thou - Go or Go Ahead.