"ART IS NOT ABOUT THE RIGHT COLOR ON THE RIGHT SURFACE; IT'S ABOUT SYNTHESIZING ONE'S EXPERIENCE"
- TODD MURPHY
For more than three decades, Todd Murphy synthesized a wide range of mediums including sculpture, painting, film, drawing and photography in mystifying combinations. Existing between anthropology and avant-garde aesthetics, the artist’s inventive mixed media works draw from revisionist histories, literary archetypes, and philosophy as a means to explore the complexities of human identity.
With the inquisitiveness of a 19th-century naturalist, Murphy traveled to the far reaches of the world, collecting, photographing, and fastidiously cataloging everything from melting glaciers, to aviary species, to exotic fruit. His photographic studies of curiosities become sources for complex narratives based on philosophy, mythology, and the supernatural. In his work, Murphy often goes beyond these classical prototypes to include subtexts of bigotry, Southern history, and fantastic literary stories. In the end, his recurring protagonists — horses, birds, dresses, and boats — are poetic vehicles for a humanistic discourse.
Todd Murphy
Todd Murphy was born in Chicago, later living and working in New York. After studying art at the University of Georgia, hill Lowe Gallery is pleased to announce the representation of The Estate of Todd Murphy (b. 1962, Chicago; d. 2020, New York) and in fall of 2022 the first major exhibition of work since the artist’s passing. For more than three decades, Murphy synthesized a wide range of mediums including sculpture, painting, film, drawing and photography in mystifying combinations. Existing between anthropology and avant-garde aesthetics, the artist’s inventive mixed media works draw from revisionist histories, literary archetypes, and philosophy as a means to explore the complexities of human identity.
“Todd Murphy: Wink,” on display October 6 through Nov. 4, presented a survey of Murphy’s final decade of work (he died from cancer, at the age of 57, in 2020). It does not pretend to be a full retrospective, and this is understandable, given the breadth of the artist’s oeuvre almost from the moment of his emergence in Atlanta, fresh out of the University of Georgia.
Murphy worshipped cultural superstars, and was regarded as one, from the moment of his first shows in Atlanta in the late 1980s. His paintings of such high-culture heroes as Samuel Beckett were reproduced on T-shirts and sold at the opening of one.
Todd Murphy was born in Chicago, later living and working in New York. After studying art at the University of Georgia, he inaugurated his artistic career in Atlanta and continued to show in Atlanta, in addition to New York, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Virginia, Seoul, South Korea and elsewhere. His work is in many prestigious international private and museum collections including The High Museum of Art, The New Orleans Museum, and The Tampa Museum of Art. Beginning in the late eighties, Murphy's enigmatic work was distinguished by an Abstract Expressionist scale and gesture applied to figurative images. These iconic figures came to heroically dominate his canvases and Plexiglas paintings - many colossal in scale and immersive in nature.
His earliest works were birthed from experimentations with 35mm slides - placing one atop or overlapping another - resulting in an illusionary, prismatic technique. This method would later characterize his approach to both his fictional, historical, and biogeographical subjects encompassing Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett, Homer's Ulysses, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and
He inaugurated his artistic career in Atlanta and continued to show in Atlanta, in addition to New York, San Francisco, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, Virginia, Seoul, South Korea and elsewhere. His work is in many prestigious international private and museum collections including The High Museum of Art, The New Orleans Museum, and The Tampa Museum of Art. Beginning in the late eighties, Murphy’s enigmatic work was distinguished by an Abstract Expressionist scale and gesture applied to figurative images. These iconic figures came to heroically dominate his canvases and Plexiglas paintings - many colossal in scale and immersive in nature.
His earliest works were birthed from experimentations with 35mm slides - placing one atop or overlapping another - resulting in an illusionary, prismatic technique. This method would later characterize his approach to both his fictional, historical, and biogeographical subjects encompassing Irish novelist and playwright Samuel Beckett, Homer’s Ulysses, anthropologist Margaret Mead, and various species of exotic wildlife.
Studio notes
I read this article: What the Hell was Modernism? The Museum of Modern Art tries to open itself up. By Jerry Saltz. in April of 2020, during covid shut down, a few weeks after Todd passed (during my shock period that has lasted for years and possibly is just my new reality). As the life long spouse of an artist w/o formal education in art or art history; coming across this article was a gift I want to share. (link to full article underlined below). Jerry Saltz's books Art is Life and How to be an Artist, are wonderful.
“We see subjectivity, something like ethics, responsibility, the social contract, personal obsession, and earnest attempts to communicate again with less insider-y audiences. Rather than plotting where this art fits on the teleological-formalist timeline, consider Romanesque and medieval church façades: These masterpieces tell essential stories in visually sophisticated, visionary ways, all with an extraordinary use of material, scale, ambition, everything, yet anyone may experience, read, grasp, and be part of this art. They are open books. These are the connotations and possibilities of art now. Art has landed on another moon.”