Viewing Catherine Murphy: Recent Work

Look closer.

At Sadie Coles HQ this September, American painter Catherine Murphy makes the everyday difficult to dismiss. Recent Work, her second solo exhibition in London, brings together paintings rooted in the environments around her home and studio in Poughkeepsie, New York, continuing a practice that has found extraordinary potential in ordinary things since the 1970s.

An exacting observer, Murphy’s earlier association with still life has gradually given way to paintings with a stranger psychological undertone, where familiar objects are reframed and resized until they begin to appear unfamiliar. Nothing needs to be spectacular to earn her attention: a chequered shirt collapses into a landscape of folds, while the iridescent drum of a tumble dryer starts to resemble another world.

Murphy studies how light catches a surface or disappears into a recess, allowing the smallest details to determine the atmosphere of an image. Though her works can be unnervingly precise, there is plenty of imagination involved as well: observed scenes sit alongside imagined ones, and the longer you look, the less straightforward the domestic world becomes.

Murphy, whose work is held by major American collections including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, created paintings that linger over the things most of us pass without a second thought, giving them more time to be observed and studied – and perhaps we should too.