Shayne Murphy: Fluorescent Gray

Anya Tish Gallery is thrilled to announce Fluorescent Gray, a solo exhibition featuring new and recent paintings and works on paper by Houston-based artist Shayne Murphy. Fluorescent Gray will mark Murphy’s inaugural solo exhibition with the gallery. Artist Reception: Friday, October 14, 6:00 – 8:30 pm. On view: October 14 – November 12, 2016.

At its core, Murphy’s work visualizes the blurry line between reality and imagination. The artist integrates the opposing pictorial languages of realistic figuration and sharp, flat, geometric forms in a seamless alliance, conceiving hazy, dreamlike, glacial spaces.

Painstakingly perfect gradations of pigment, which could be mistaken for digitally rendered prints, live alongside smoky explosions of graphite that Murphy creates by hitting the tip of a pencil against the wood panel hundreds of times.

Executed in vibrant candy colors, blurry scribbles and clouds of dusty gray, these barren landscapes and their inhabitants beget an eerie atmosphere suggesting an existence somewhere between utopian and dystopian.

Informed by his fascination in mythology, history, folklore and literature, Murphy assigns the occupants of his paintings specific archetypal roles—transient, protector, or destroyer—and depicts each character in a state of dynamic but halted action. Teetering between reality and reverie, Murphy’s work forces speculation of what we see, what we imagine, and whether these concepts are mutually exclusive.

Shayne Murphy holds an MFA in Drawing and Painting from the University of North Texas, and has exhibited his work across Texas in such venues as Blue Star Contemporary Art Museum, San Antonio; Lawndale Art Center, Houston; Texas A&M International University, Laredo; 500x Gallery, Dallas; Beaumont Art League, Beaumont; and the University of North Texas Main Gallery, Denton. In 2014, Murphy completed the yearlong Artist Studio Program residency at Lawndale Art Center in Houston, Texas.

His work can be found in private and corporate collections, including Houston’s Bush Intercontinental Airport.