David Murphy
Born in Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK, 1982
Lives and works in Lewisham, South London
David Murphy (b. 1982, UK), whose practice includes sculpture, work on paper and painting, touching upon the various manifestations of human activity and its impact on the environment. David Murphy’s paintings are made with a tool which scratches the surface as if it is guiding a path in the landscape, almost like ploughing a field, or perhaps weaving at the loom.
Biography
David Murphy was born in 1982 in Newcastle upon Tyne and lives and works in Lewisham, south London. He studied at Newcastle College and the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Dresden, and finished at Glasgow School of Art in 2006, where he won the Newbery Medal.
Murphy works in sculpture, painting, drawing and glass. He makes his paintings in casein on gesso panel and scratches into the surface with a tool. In earlier sculptures he bent steel wire and wove it through rings to form rigid tubes. Blanket, a sculpture nearly 15 metres long that suggests a magnified weave, was the first visual arts commission for the courtyard of The Piece Hall in Halifax, presented with Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 2019. He has worked with glass-makers in Cairo and on Murano, where he made the glass sculpture Spiller in 2015.
He held the Kenneth Armitage Foundation Fellowship from 2015 to 2017. His painting Long Ending (Green) was selected for the John Moores Painting Prize 2016 exhibition at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. Solo exhibitions include Certain Impacts at PEER, London (2014), Deep, Deeper at Galleria Monica de Cardenas, Milan (2015) and DRIFT at ALMA ZEVI, Venice (2019). He has made public commissions in Wensleydale (2016) and for the National Trust at Packwood House, Warwickshire (2020).
At Bartha Contemporary, Murphy's work was in Tactile Line, a group exhibition curated by Giulia Ricci (19 July to 22 September 2018). His solo presentation New Tints (8 September to 3 October 2020) showed stained glass works in mouth-blown sheet glass set in lead and held in hinged brass frames. His casein paintings were part of The Green New Deal, online (20 January to 24 February 2024) and at the gallery (14 February to 2 March 2024).
