Wild Reveries

Anat Ebgi is pleased to announce Wild Reveries, an exhibition of new paintings by British artist Jemima Murphy. This is Murphy's first solo exhibition in New York and second occasion exhibiting with the gallery. Jemima Murphy's painted fields of shifting impressions emerge from an attentiveness to the physicality of paint and rhythmic mark making. Gesturing toward the natural world, Murphy describes her works as reimagined landscapes. Her works evoke cycles of blooming, drifting, and dispersal found in the natural world, while resisting fixed and literal depictions. Instead, they propose landscapes of sensation, where touch, tempo, and chromatic intensity break open new modes of perception. Rooted in the long lineage of British and European sensorial abstraction, Murphy employs a recurring vocabulary of brush strokes. Sheer, organic, dripping, these motifs repeat with variation across multiple canvases building expansive, porous fields. Through this process of accumulation and layering, her compositions become defined by density and motion, aligning her practice with the legacies of transatlantic postwar abstraction. The compositions behave like unfolding events, stages upon which innumerable gestures accumulate into dramatic, choreographed rhythms. For Murphy—who studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York prior to completing her fine art coursework in London—the act of painting is inseparable from understanding movement. This includes the physicality of applying paint to canvas as well as the embodied movement of the viewing subject. Sweeping arcs, looping strokes, and cascading spume index the body's velocity and the passage of time. The works in Wild Reveries retain the 'live' quality of performance and a character of openness, poised between the intuitive and the improvised, with marks coalescing in cloud-like congregation. In tandem with the physicality of her medium, Murphy draws on the psychological and emotional potential of color.