Will Murchison: Find the Beginning

February 19 - March 26,2022

From Erin Cluley Gallery:

"Using a dizzying combination of painting, collage, and manipulation techniques, artist Will Murchison creates bold, abstracted works that dissolve mythic and historic imagery into dense fields of shape and color. Layers are teeming with materials, both found and constructed, that have been built up or eroded away. Intricate cuttings meander through the composition, rendering a compact surface geography that is disorienting and rudimentarily ornate­. The source images, now buried, transform into but a ghost of themselves.

Murchison has developed a technique for making sheets of acrylic paint that can be cut and reapplied to his paintings. These skins of paint allow him to capture the accident and energy of spills and gestural painting without losing the collage artist’s ability to manipulate and arrange materials. In applying the acrylic sheets to the painting, Murchison intuitively responds to the underlying imagery and the surface of the skin with a combination of collage, further painting, and mosaic application of acrylic pieces. The result is reminiscent of cellular structures or aerial images of topography.

Drawing from Greek mythology, Murchison uses symbols from the parables as a basis for the works in this exhibition. Rather than focusing on the traditional aspects of storytelling, he is most interested in the shrouded histories behind the myths. His inspiration derives from a reflection on the real people attributed to those myths as they tried to make sense of their own world. Behind the garish imagery are the whispers from a forgotten time.

The title of the exhibition, Find the Beginning, refers to both Murchison’s intricately worked surfaces and the narrative themes explored in the paintings. The titular phrase is also a quote from the opening lines of The Odyssey in which Homer calls upon Athena to guide his telling of the coming tale.

The paintings, then, become a physical talisman that echoes the ethereal nature of the mythic past."

Reception: February 19, 2022 | 5-8 pm

Erin Cluley Gallery 150 Manufacturing Street, Suite 210
Dallas , Texas 75212
Get Directions