David Murphy

British artist David Murphy is a painter and sculptor whose work explores the interplay between volume, light, space and line. The forms that inhabit his works often develop out of accumulations - discrete actions that embrace unpredictability within repetitive processes. 

With theLong Ending and Blanket paintings, Murphy prepares Gesso Panels using traditional French chalk and rabbit skin glue following a technique devised by Cennino Cennini in the 15th

century. To this surface Murphy applies multiple layers of casein paint in meshed lines, to create a dense textile-like surface. Once dry, and polished, a sequence of more or less regular lines are scratched with an etching needle into the surface, excavating an image from the chalk that teeters on the brink of three-dimensions. These are slow and meditative abstract works that remain highly allusive: at once recalling the microcosm and the macrocosm, tracks and furrows, mountains and valleys, fabrics or upholstery.

"By investigating mass and tension, by pushing materials to their brink and responding with sensitivity, David makes work which is transgressive of those fixed ideas of what art is and should be. This is an innately physical practice. Rhythm and movement flow throughout, revealing and pointing us towards the fundamental energy in all things. David’s work lives in the threshold between boundaries, between 2D and 3D, between figuration and abstraction, between the organic and the man-made, in the space just beyond our perception."