Darren Murray
b. 1977, Ireland
Darren Murray plays knowingly on the history of painting, provocatively juxtaposing several kinds of pictorial convention simultaneously. His images of birds are rendered with the meticulous precision of naturalistic method, even of ornithological illustration, but his colour-saturated backgrounds recall the sublime abstraction of colour field painting, while the stylised elements of his compositions refer to the decorative and ornamental use of natural motifs in patterns. The result in each case is a subtly achieved and contradictory coherence, a complex, coded image that nudges us towards acknowledging the different levels of perception we automatically bring to anything we look at.
— Aidan Dunne, The Repeated Disappearance of Painting
(Text: friends + neighbours catalogue, 2000)
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