February 25 - April 5, Amanda Wilkinson Gallery

Aileen Murphy is no stranger to playful ambiguity. She actively seeks to distort and perplex onlookers. Her show Crackers for Lorelei at Amanda Wilkinson Gallery encapsulates this feeling of almost unnameable intrigue and even unease that the paintings evoke. Each pictorial plane she crafts could collapse upon themselves. The illustrative, doll-like figures often present within her work are contorted and bent within the folds of fluorescent color and objects that seem to have arrived from some parallel universe.

Murphy’s work is surreal, even jarring. The paintings stir inevitable questions to the viewer. What and where are the worlds that the viewer has stepped into? How was Murphy created a visual language seemingly singular to herself as the artist in order to craft these worlds? The artist has taken liberties to conceal, to plant secrets and ambiguities within the crevices of paint. In Grotto, these secrets present themselves to the viewer in a large smear of cerulean and washy ombres of orange and pink; they caress a rounded door-like opening that holds the bottom half of figure. Her skin is an almost sickly-bright yellow. Her posture is slumped though we cannot see her face or her torso. Her left leg is turned inward, as if it has been bent at its plastic hinges. It is as if she has been placed upon a pedestal, an exhaustion of prolonged standing manifested in her physical stance. The piece is certainly unnerving. Despite its bright, bold patterning and arranged colors, this anonymous female figure droops towards the bottom of the canvas in a zombified manner.

The paintings of Crackers for Lorelei are confrontational. They do not seek to appease the eyes of the viewer in aesthetic virtue necessarily, which seems to be the aim of the artist. They are also sporadic, and evidently unplanned. Murphy is a improvisational painter, and this is perhaps the reason for such rich worlds and spaces that are birthed from coats of paint.

Aileen Murphy: Crackers for Lorelei is on until the 5th of April at Amanda Wilkinson Gallery in Farringdon, London.

Aileen Murphy: Crackers for Lorelei

February 25 - April 5, Amanda Wilkinson Gallery

Mario Martinez: Yaqui & Brooklyn Conversations