Aileen Murphy
Sligo, Ireland. 1984
Aileen Murphy (1984) was born in Sligo, and 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.
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. 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.
