Aileen Murphy, Age (detail), 2022, oil and oil stick on canvas, 200 x 200 cm

Aileen Murphy - food that I would feed my lover

Deborah Schamoni is pleased to present the second gallery exhibition by Irish artist Aileen Murphy.

The vivid painterly gestures suggest exuberant joy and stimulation, but seem quite more complex upon closer inspection: the surface consists of scribbles and marks, translucent watercolor base layers reveal traces of erasures, and text blurbs are scratched in the wet paint.

Aileen Murphy, installation view food that I would feed my lover, Deborah Schamoni

“Her art thrives, in part, on tensions between the potential uplift of bodily stimulation and the gravitational pull of a more clumsy, disappointing reality. Teasing, dreamy allusions to assorted states of sensory delight are balanced—or willfully unbalanced—by attention to mundane somatic situations or by the aggressive application of uglifying effects.”

- Declan Long for Artforum about Aileen Murphy

Aileen Murphy, installation view food that I would feed my lover, Deborah Schamoni

Aileen Murphy, Wednesday (detail), 2022, oil and oil stick on canvas, 190 x 150 cm

In her distinctive approach to painting, Murphy generates imagery through a combination of slow layering and fast applications of oil paint, animating a delicate urgency and sparking sensations of both epiphany and discomfort. Fictive characters are the focal points of Murphy’s paintings. The figures fluctuate under the viewer’s eye, revealing and concealing themselves behind and via the materiality of the medium.

Aileen Murphy, installation view food that I would feed my lover, Deborah Schamoni

The paintings have evolved through Murphy’s experimental exploration of paint. In her hands, painting is an act of imaginative action—colour and gesture are live wires. The images committed to canvas arrive there through an ongoing process of reinvention. A true identity is revealed only to then conceal itself and re-emerge as something other but no less true.

Aileen Murphy, Dover (Detail), 2022, oil, marker, ink, oil stick, pigment, decorative sand on canvas, 150 x 120 cm

Aileen Murphy, Wednesday, 2022, oil and oil stick on canvas, 190 x 150 cm

Aileen Murphy, routines 1–24, 2022, ink and acrylic on paper, 59 x 42 cm

Aileen Murphy (Born Sligo, 1984, lives and works in Berlin), graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (2007) and then studied under Amy Sillman and Monika Baer at Städelschule Frankfurt, graduating in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include WET TALK at Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2022) and Flush at Amanda Wilkinson Gallery, London (2020)