Hannah Murgatroyd’s works can be seen as island spaces of the imagination; painted and drawn worlds inhabited by protagonists who spring from a history of the body, as told through high art, popular culture and personal narrative. Her images often explore a moment of desire; one that is owned equally by men and women. Any narrative they suggest exists by association and their encounters are passages marked by gesture: in the drawn and painted surface and in their bodily pose and dress; how they glance, perhaps, or raise a finger in relationship to one another; the specific heel of a boot or weft of a sweater.

Murgatroyd is also concerned with what it is for a contemporary artist to make landscape paintings today, and is particularly interested in the landscape as a peopled world. In recent works the body is set within the landscape; rural scenes with seasonal, working bodies that feel somehow consigned to the past, yet idealised through our current fetishisation of authenticity, craft and the local. She presents a vision of the world that is eroticised, ambiguous, emotional and deeply engaged with surface. Her hyper-realised bodies are pneumatic, poised within the natural environment and bathed in colours that seduce the viewer into feeling feelings based on what might be real.

EXHIBITION PHOTOGRAPHS

ADDITIONAL ACTIVITY

Exhibition Tour & Artist Talk
Sat 2 Sep | 2.30pm | free

Join artist Hannah Murgatroyd and Phoenix Gallery curator Matt Burrows for a tour of the exhibition and a talk from the artist.

VENUE: PHOENIX GALLERY

Our main contemporary art space, exhibiting new work from regional, national and international artists.

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