Wil Murray: Please Boss Remember Me

Canadian artist Wil Murray’s first UK solo exhibition. Spanning the past two years of his multi-faceted practise, the exhibition will include his large-scale three-dimensional planar paintings, multiple exposure collages, and recent hand coloured photographic works.

Murray’s work is a hybrid of painting and photography. Exploring painting as a method less based on procedure than materiality, Murray brings together the processes of painting and analogue photography. Highlighting the role of the object, his work employs time-based processes that allow the object to be represented, redeveloped and obscured. His use of photography speaks more of an investigation of paintings’ relationship to time and object than the production of digital images for immediate consumption.

Developing on from his site-specific installation ‘Painted Shut’ at VITRINE Bermondsey Square in 2012, this exhibition will expand on the relationship he draws between painting and collage. His new work lays its roots in earlier paintings, which the artist redevelops through a series of time-rich processes. In his ‘Collaged Drape’ series, work is repainted and partially obscured with fabric drapes before being photographed in black and white. Murray then recolours the single and multiple exposure prints with photo-oil paint.

In his ‘Adieu Vielle Europe’ series found images of landscapes and interiors are retraced through paint. “I am horrified by my hands and the actions they take, so I make my work from the actions tangential to them: accidents and omissions. No matter the medium, I prefer to approach its glittering emptiness and be made blind by its brightness or the shadow it casts. By stumbling blindly, more actions are taken, but fewer could be claimed as mine.”

Wil Murray Generously funded by the Alberta Foundation For The Arts and The Canada Council and supported by Colourpoint Bermondsey Square.

Wil Murray (b. 1978, Calgary, Canada) studied painting at the Alberta College of Art and Design and currently lives and works in Canada. He has exhibited internationally, including at The National Gallery of Canada, East, Peggy Phelps Galleries (Claremont CA) and Staatsgalerie Prenzlauer Berg (Berlin). Amongst others, he has had solo shows at VITRINE Bermondsey Square, London; P|M Gallery, Toronto; Library Cote-St. Luc, Montreal; Staatsgalerie Prenzlauer Berg, Berlin; and Patrick Mikhail Gallery, Ottawa. He received an honourable mention in the prestigious RBC Canadian Painting Competition for his painting "Sexe Maniac Maniac Maniac Maniac Maniac" and his work was also featured in the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art’s exhibition for national top-painters 'Carte Blanche Vol. 2', 2008. His work has recently been exhibited in group shows at The Hole, New York; GALERIE DE L’UQAM in Montréal, Québec; Gymnasia Herzliya, Tel-Aviv, Israel and Rene Blouin Gallery, Montreal. Murray has also played in several notoriously loud and short-spoken experimental bands.