DAVID MURPHY
Deep, Deeper
28 May - 31 July 2015

After the successful exhibition in our gallery in Zuoz in 2013, we are now delighted to announce David Murphy’s first solo show in Italy. David Murphy (*1983) is an emerging British sculptor who approaches his work with an instinctive sensitivity towards the innate textures and qualities of the materials at hand. In doing so, he creates visions of abstract, yet familiar, forms.

Murphy’s sculptures are like drawings in space: the play between line and volume, space and lightness, is central to his work. These qualities inform his exploration of patterns that define and re-present the patterns integral to organic forms. Furthermore, the works engage with the microcosm and macrocosm of structures found in nature, acting like a lens that zooms in and out of woven fabric, foliage, or cells, revealing hidden or invisible structures, while remaining essentially abstract.

Last year David Murphy spent a period of time as Artist in Residence at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, UK. The three groups of sculptures presented here bear the traces of that period of immersion in the rural landscape. Tangles of root-like forms are raised high on tables, others seemingly grow and climb the walls. These works appear to occupy a threshold between organic and inorganic matter, between growth and ossification.

The manipulation of materials, intimate and tactile, speaks of the interaction between human intention and the natural world. Central to the exhibition are three large freestanding sculptures made from individual sheets of thin aluminum, which have each been subjected to repeated hammer blows over many hours. Murphy is both in control of and directed by his medium and tools; with each strike the metal subtly stretches and warps. It is through this process of hand-working that the material is gradually redefined.

The forms that inhabit Murphy’s works often develop out of such accumulations, discrete units or actions that exploit and embrace unpredictability within repetitive processes. The particular character of the material determines whether this growth manifests itself as an object or as marks on paper, but in both cases the traces of a slow movement results in ambiguous forms that resist easy identification. Here, distinctions between image and object are endlessly contested; sculptures as black line drawings, others that lean on the wall for support, and works on paper that blur the distinction between two and three dimensions by creating optical topographies.
A specially commissioned text by Paddy Butler accompanies the exhibition.

David Murphy was born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, in 1983, and lives and works in London. Recent and forthcoming exhibitions include: Groundwork, The New Art Centre Roche Court, UK (2015); Keep it Real, Bayt-Al-Sinnari Centre for Culture, Cairo, Egypt (2015); Certain Impacts, PEER, London (2014); Zeichnung ohne Zeichnung, Christian Ehrentraut Galerie, Berlin (2013); New Basics, Galleria Monica de Cardenas, Zuoz (2013); Young English Sculptors, Fundaziun Not Vital, Switzerland (2012); Anschlüssel, Frühsorge Contemporary Drawings, Berlin (2012); Aggregate!, Event Gallery, London (2011). He was artist in residence at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park (2014); Atelier Concorde, Lisbon (2012); Edinburgh Sculpture Workshop, Scotland (2011), and M4 Gastatelier, Amsterdam (2010). He will be artist in residence in Murano, Italy in June 2015.