In her distinctive approach to painting, Aileen Murphy generates imagery through a combination of slow layering and fast applications of oil paint, animating a delicate urgency and sparking sensations of both epiphany and discomfort. Fictive characters are the focal points of Murphy’s paintings. The figures fluctuate under the viewer’s eye, revealing and concealing themselves behind and via the materiality of the medium.
The vivid painterly gestures suggest exuberant joy and stimulation, but seem quite more complex upon closer inspection: the surface consists of scribbles and marks, translucent watercolor base layers reveal traces of erasures, and text blurbs are scratched in the wet paint.

In Murphys hands, painting is an act of imaginative action—colour and gesture are live wires. The images committed to canvas arrive there through an ongoing process of reinvention. A true identity is revealed only to then conceal itself and re-emerge as something other but no less true.

Aileen Murphy (b.1984, Sligo) is an Irish painter based in Berlin. Murphy graduated from the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (2007) and then studied under Amy Sillman and Monika Baer at Städelschule Frankfurt, graduating in 2018. Recent solo exhibitions include “food that I would feed my lover”, Deborah Schamoni, Munich, Germany (2022), “WET TALK”, Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin, Ireland (2022), “face not her own her hair”, Amanda Wilkinson, London, UK (2021), “PANTING”, Temple Bar Gallery and Studios, Dublin (2019), “Bounty” (with Diana Copperwhite), Kevin Kavanagh, Dublin (2018), “Naked Cheerleaders in my Chest”, Deborah Schamoni, Munich (2017). Recent group exhibitions include “THE SAME AS EVER BUT MORE SO”, curated by Miriam Bettin, Braunsfelder, Cologne (2018), “And Creatures Dream… A new Language”, The Wexford Arts Centre (2017), “Opals”, curated by Vincent Honoré, Galleri Opdahl, Stavanger (2016).

Multidisciplinary artist Shannon Finnegan inserts interventions into exhibition spaces to focus on their accessibility. The works reflect their overarching practice and its focus on accessibility on both physical and digital spaces.

There are many places where no provisions seem to have been made for people and their basic physical needs, their tiredness and exhaustion, for example, within the white cube of the contemporary art world, in which furnishings themselves can become art. Finnegan shows that access can only be ensured where the ideology of a conforming, normative body is unlearned and spaces are reconceived on the basis of multiple needs. In this way, the act of sitting recalls the sit- in as a protest form, with its occupation of space suggesting the presence of political bodies who often remain invisible at the protest marches where participants are required to be mobile.
The day clocks “Have you ever fallen in love with a clock?” move so slowly that it’s hard to tell if they’re working at all. “What are the objects of disability culture?” Finnegan asks.

Shannon Finnegan (b. 1989, lives and works in New York, USA), graduated in 2011 at Carleton College, Northfield, MN. Some of their recent work includes “Anti-Stairs Club Lounge”, an ongoing project that gathers people together who share an aversion to stairs; “Alt-Text as Poetry”, a collaboration with Bojana Coklyat that explores the expressive potential of image description; and “Do You Want Us Here or Not”, a series of benches and cushions designed for exhibition spaces. They have done projects with Banff Centre, ARGOS Centre for Audiovisual Arts, the High Line, the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver, MMK Frankfurt, LUX, and Nook Gallery. In 2022, Deborah Schamoni presented their solo exhibition “Slower”. Their work has been supported by a 2018 Wynn Newhouse Award, a 2019 residency at Eyebeam, and a 2020 grant from Art Matters Foundation.