River Crossing, 2024-25 by Idris Murphy, collage and acrylic on board, 83x88 cm. Currently on display at KSGoW, in Vibrations of the Primal. On until September 20.
Anthony Frater (EastSideFM Radio), recently reviewed Idris Murphy’s current solo show at KSGoW, ‘Vibrations of the Primal‘.
“It always a long awaited treat when a new collection of paintings from Idris Murphy come to market. […]
His work is recognised and collected nationally and internationally and despite the fact that there are solid figurative elements and discernible forms it is reasonably safe to say – not that one likes locking an artist into a genre box – he is an Abstract Expressionist painter. His work is well served by a deliberately contrived even fortuitous terra-morphism in that his interpretation of perspective, form and reality are deeply altered and shifted so that what is manifested becomes a metaphor or symbol for what would otherwise seem obvious even banal.
He camps out, works at an easel en plein air, often finishing his works in the studio and indeed to see his paintings one is compelled to rush out at once to where he paints: a land called Mutawintji in far western New South Wales, or Gondwana Land, Fowlers Gap, East McDonald Ranges, Ruby Gap, Hale River or Ross River and in the words of Robert Louis Stevenson, “feel the needs and hitches of our life more nearly, to come down off the featherbed of civilisation and find the globe granite underfoot and strewn with cutting flints“.
– Excerpt from Anthony’s review, published to EastSideFM 89.7, Arts Wednesday online