TANGLE

Christopher Murphy Tangle

My recent series of paintings is interested in the notions of pattern, repetition, and uniformity. These realistic scenes are nudged (ever so slightly) towards abstraction through various formal elements. Oblique perspectives flatten or distort space, awkward croppings obscure subjects, and figures, uniforms, and colors are cloned ad infinitum. Visual rhythms and symmetries seek a fragile balance between harmony and chaos, while repeated forms or clashing deviations question whether individuality can exist within homogeneity. The starting point for these works are found photographs, culled from family albums, estate sales, and thrift stores. My interest in found photos as inspiration is manifold. First, it places limits on the otherwise complete control of the artistic process, with hopes of fostering new creative possibilities (the paradoxical idea of a liberating constraint).

Additionally, I have long been drawn to found photos for their ostensible qualities of candidness, permanence, and accuracy, and am keen to explore the relationship that painting can have with these purported qualities. Using the photo as a springboard, new realities can be synthesized by dramatically restaging the action (or stillness), recontextualizing figures, or grafting on invented scenarios. These paintings, then, become false verisimilitudes, painterly facsimiles of photos that never may have existed or events that never may have happened. They are meant to feel at once solid and destabilizing.

The tensions between the painting and the photo are further complicated by the slow and laborious attempt to render realistically an otherwise transitory moment, captured initially with an instantaneous technology. Layers of oil are built up over a long duration, creating a texture which shares little with the glossy smoothness of a photo. What becomes of a snapshot if months are required to take it?

Christopher Murphy

December 2022

Los Angeles, CA

I

Settled

Christopher Murphy

1977 Born: Irvine, CA

Education

2002 B.F.A., Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA

Solo Exhibitions

2023 Billis Williams Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

2019 Ebb, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2017 Idle, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2013 Sturm and Drang, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2011 Forget That You Were Young, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2008 The Dawn of Luxury, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2005 Matter in the Wrong Place, Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica, CA

2003 Only A Reed, Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica, CA

2002 Creative Artist Agency, Beverly Hills, CA

Selected Group Exhibitions

2019 Figurative Group Show Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2017 Small Works Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2014 Group Show, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2012 Summer Group Show, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2012 Landscapes Revisited, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2012 Small Paintings, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2011 Gallery Artists, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2010 small works, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2010 Faces, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2009 The Toy Show II, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2009 Draw the Line, Lora Schlesinger Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

2006 Undertow, Metalstone Gallery, New York, NY

2003 Image & Enigma, Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica, CA

2002 Paintings, Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Santa Monica, CA

2002 Figure This II, Fine Art Gallery, California State University, Los Angeles, CA

2002 Group Show, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA

2002 Group Show, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA

2001 Group Show, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, CA

Awards

2012 New American Paintings Reader’s Choice Award

Bibliography

2023Christopher Murphy: Tangled, American Art Collector, Issue 208, February 2023

2023Zellen, Jody, Pick of the Week: Christopher Murphy, What’s On Los Angeles (online), Jan. 19

2011 Zellen, Jody. Christopher Murphy, Art Scene, Vol. 31, No. 1, September 2011

2008 Ollman, Leah. His Paintings Capture Change, Los Angeles Times, September 19

2006 Zellen, Jody. ‘Christopher Murphy’ at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Art Papers, March/April

2004 Frank, Peter. ‘Image & Enigma’ at Hunsaker/Schlesinger Fine Art, Artweek, February 2004

2003 Blizzard, Peggy. Artist has successful first solo professional show, Irvine World News, August 21

2003 Knight, Christopher. Emergence from the void, Los Angeles Times, July 25