Murphy’s paintings engage with imagistic oddness and the medium’s capacity for seduction
Aileen Murphy’s third exhibition at Deborah Schamoni revolves around a single, deceptively simple motif: the table, or rather something that resembles one. Across the Berlin-based Irish artist’s five new paintings, which are dominated by rosé and pink tones and frequently feature animals, that domestic object becomes a visual anchor. Here, scenes unfold that light-footedly engage with both imagistic oddness and the medium of painting’s capacity for seduction.
In snacks and sprite (all works 2025) a slightly slanted blue line cuts across the picture plane: a meticulously rendered white cat with horrormovie red eyes hovers over it, suggesting the line itself were a tabletop.Two disembodied arms wrap around the animal in an embrace as tender as the stroking brushmarks of the powdery Persian rose field from which they emerge. The lower half of the canvas, saturated in a lush dark pink, hosts two hastily sketched legs and buttocks formed from dripping white paint. Akiwi-green spot rests mischievously between two feet, adding a further note of absurdity.
Murphy, who finished her studies in 2018, has since then carved representational elements out of abstract gestures, although such detailed figuration is new to her practice, and adds a surreal edge to it. little red walls shows an opulent building resembling a doll’s house before a pink background that is cracked open in the middle. In invisible table, royal blue trees on shaped cutout backgrounds, showing a bit of sky behind them, stand on a checked tablecloth as if collaged into the picture. Below, a yellow snake slithers through watery streaks of Persian rose mixed with wax. In the upper left corner, an irregular square of midnight blue appears – a recurring motif in the exhibition, hovering between a self-contained colour field and the suggestion of a shuttered window.
Usually, the table constitutes a setting where relationships and community but also socialisation and disciplining unfold; where people learn how to behave, sit, be seen. But in Murphy’s paintings, the tablelike surface is not only an excuse to experiment with the division of the picture plane; it also acts as a stage for playing out childlike and dreamlike visions unconcerned by what may appear logical or representable. They rather speak to the table’s underside: a concealed space of secret touches, of things slipping out of sight, of children or animals playing beneath its surface. And it is exactly the enigmatic workings of fantasy and the longing for hidden realities that come to the table(s) in Murphy’s canvases.
The exhibition title is borrowed from Elizabeth Bishop’s poem ‘Sleeping on the Ceiling’ (1946), in which the narrator envisions the bedroom ceiling as if it were the Place de la Concorde in Paris, interwoven with restless foliage and insects. Domestic interior, urban monument and psychological landscape dissolve into one another, forming a hybrid space that unsettles the line between cultivated order and unruly nature. Murphy’s paintings, too, are born from contradictions, wherein refined figuration exists side by side with creamy strokes, monochrome surfaces with scraped lines, the clumsy with the well-rehearsed. Their scenes are as funny as they are uncanny, as serious about painting’s possibilities as they are joyful about performing its different registers. And for all their sensual appeal, they remain deeply strange – inviting viewers to linger at the table, and all the while undermining its stability.
We must go under the wallpaper at Deborah Schamoni, Munich, 9 January – 21 March
