ApolloGallery.ie

enter your email address for our free newsletter:

search site:

Click here for our free Newsweaver Newsletter l email: art@apollogallery.ie

T.C Murphy



Bird 1	Bird 3	Bird 4	Bird 5





Salmon of Knowledge	Sligo at Sunset

T.C. Murphy was born in Walkinstown, County Dublin in 1953. He went to school in Drimnage Castle which he left at the age of 16 to take up an apprenticeship in the jewellery trade with Irish Diamond Jewellers. After four years he became restless and travelled to Denmark. Here he worked initially as a cutler, then became a forester and even spent some time labouring in a steelworks. It was during this period that T.C. began to paint.

He subsequently moved to Christiana an experimental commune south of Copenhagen where he devoted himself to his art. He spent four years in the artist's colony and sensing a Celtic impulse coming through his work, he returned to Ireland in 1988 to get closer to his roots.

Transported from Denmark, with backing from the Apollo Gallery, T.C. Murphy's work is now a showcase of promising talent, and has already proved itself a springboard to fame. He has participated in many group exhibitions since his return to Ireland and had a one-man exhibition at the Apollo Gallery which was a sell out.

His spikey manner of painting, his colors, Murphy's celebratory images of the cosmos and interest in the subconsiousnes guarantee a vibrant canvas. One of his native talents is to recognise and exploit images that seem commonplace at first sight - a mask, a bird, a flower, but turn out to have a lot of staying power. The effectiveness of his pictures of masks is quite surprising. It is partly an artistic revenge on an Irish art world dominated by dull greens and murkey browns.

He mixes and applies paint as though no one had ever taught him. His palette is especially uncultivated, though no innocent artist would have chosen such psychedelic greens, reds and violent purples. His influences are numerous, which is not an amateur characteristic, they have been selected by sophistication. The Danish artist Asgen Jorn and Edward Munch have been a major influence, and inspiration also comes from the Cobra School of North European painting. Murphy picks up things from his contemporaries too, but these are mixed forces that count.

In T.C.'s paintings, a sense of the infinite and formless lies behind the quivering surface symbols of every canvas the manifest universe projected on the background of reality like a film projected on a screen.