Doktor, Doktor: Solo show in Berlin

Doctor, Doctor Every Night I Dream Your Investigation My Notion

Solo exhibition of painting, collage, weaving and photography by Wil Murray

March 18th to 25th

Vernissage March 22nd, 19h

Sur La Montagne Gallery

Torstraße 170, Berlin

Russian Girls, maybe pages collages

A series of collages I made last sumer on arcademi, see more of the series here.

made from a book on traditional Russian folk dress(a common sort of photo book leftover from the days pf the DDR), and draped drop sheets I photographed covering my paintings.

p|m Gallery Toronto

I am very pleased to announce I will be represented by p|m Gallery in Toronto, Canada.

You can check out my works and info on their page here.

I'll have a solo show opening there in October of 2012.

Culture Hall Page

I've been invited to set up a page with Culture Hall, a New York based site presenting artist pages and monthly curated features. See it here.
From their page:
"Culturehall is a curated online resource for contemporary art where selected artists can share their work with curators, gallerists, collectors and other artists. We provide free artist portfolios with an easy to use set of web-based tools to make presenting art online simple and efficient. Our community of artists consists primarily of MFA graduates, arts professionals and teaching artists. Membership is available by invitation"

"Silver" exhibition Opening at Diane Farris Tonight. New collages from Berlin.

Silver December 3 – 23 Artist Reception: December 3, 2009, 6 – 8 pm Diane Farris Gallery ends 2009 with a lot to celebrate. In its 25th Anniversary year, the gallery has the same energy that first made it an exciting new art venue in 1984. The gallery continues the tradition of introducing new artists to Vancouver while featuring the best of those who have been part of its cast since the beginning. Silver presents both large and small-scale artworks by gallery artists Shannon Belkin, Dale Chihuly, Judith Currelly, John Dennison, Angela Grossmann, Kathryn Jacobi, Nick Lepard and Wil Murray. Silver also welcomes two new sculptors to the gallery: internationally-acclaimed New York artist Ilan Averbuch and Seattle-based sculptor Joseph McDonnell. Ilan Averbuch is well-known for massive outdoor pieces composed of granite, stone, lead and wood beams. They are truly fantastic in nature and in scope. Two drawings in this exhibit demonstrate his mastery of spatial balance as well as his playful, ironic nature. In the courtyard, two major works by Seattle artist Joseph McDonnell introduce his dramatic, almost Cubist sculptures of metal and granite. Their pit-marked, weathered surfaces and teetering forms capture a sense of ancient, primordial symbols and lost civilizations. New paintings by Shannon Belkin, Judith Currelly and Angela Grossmann are featured along with works on paper by Wil Murray, Nick Lepard, Kathryn Jacobi and John Dennison. Murray’s popular collages juxtapose images from National Geographic magazines with photographs of his paintings in maquette-like compositions. Kathryn Jacobi shows prints from her Baby series, while Nick Lepard presents charcoal drawings done as studies for his large oil portraits. Currelly’s large-scale work on wood panel depicts a polar bear reigning over a frozen landscape. At the feminine extreme of the exhibit, Vancouver painter Shannon Belkin has created a lovely soft study of dogs on a plush pink pillow.

My work at Aqua Wynwood Miami

I am pleased to announce that I will be showing some small work with the Michael Gibson Gallery at the Aqua Wynwood art fair during Art Basel Miami Beach. You can find my collages at Booth # 5, December 3rd-6th.

This Haunted House Is Not A Haunted Home

This Haunted House Is Not A Haunted Home:

New Works by Wil Murray

April 23rd to May 9th, 2009
Opening Reception April 23rd 6pm-8pm

Diane Farris Gallery
1590 W. 7th Avenue
Vancouver, Canada
V6J 1S2
tel (604) 737-2629

Exhibition Preview

Exhibition Statement:

“Who am I? If this once I were to rely on a proverb, then perhaps everything would amount to knowing whom I 'haunt.' I must admit that this last word is misleading, tending to establish between certain beings and myself relations that are stranger, more disturbing than I intended. Such a word means much more than it says, makes me, still alive, play a ghostly part, evidently referring to what I must have ceased to be in order to be who I am”

From Nadja, Andre Breton

I am a haunted house painter.
One night I heard from my writer friend a description of our bodies as houses, haunted by ghosts. This image stuck with me, and became parasite or symbiont to my memory of Breton’s lines. So I sang "There's A Ghost In My House" by R. Dean Taylor over and over and thought: The studio door disembodies. It invites visitation.
My own seduction by photography haunts me. Photographs of my paintings linger in me like a portrait of a lover or of myself. I am captivated by them, gazing as if I could see around or past the subject, into its hands or mouth, or into shadows. Or maybe just a little further up its leg, down its blouse. Into a privately known place that the photographic portrait will not show. What was past my eyes. What turned me on and sent me to the photo in the first place.
For this exhibition I’ve made dripping, tumescent, over-stimulating paintings that at first horrify away from themselves, toward the safe seduction of their portrait. But this printed flatness bores nearly as quickly as it is consumed, and once desirous of girth, weight and threat, one is drawn back to the painting in a lather - calm and collected after privately completing a seduction/consumption narrative, but quietly haunted by a relationship to the pornographic likeness - to be horrified, delighted and titillated again.
The paintings are named for anonymous ghosts. Titles function as clues to the forms taken by my spectral companions that just hung there as I paced from painting to portrait and back again.
I wish for paintings that send a viewer to flat portraits to swoon as I had, and to wish, as I did, for a return to the discomfort of their own grinning movements with the very real painting. I wish to share my own queezy seduction by ghosts by becoming myself a spectral seducer to others.
I wish to haunt and be haunted and wish again to haunt back.

* image shown: "February Is An Annual Race To The Bottom Aroun Here" Mixed Media Collage, 7" X 12", 2009(click image for larger version)