Matthew Murphy is a graduate of the Slade (2004), where his paintings were characterised by hallucinatory compositions that mixed skewed motifs from the Canadian landscape of his youth with suggestions of outlandish creatures and macabre events: comedic black narratives that took shape slowly against iridescent, highly oiled backgrounds.

Murphy’s most recent work retains this gallows humour, coupled with his dark sense of mischief in narrative. In his recent solo show at Wyer Gallery entitled Exile and the Kingdom, Murphy presented a series of paintings inspired by St. Patrick’s Day night in London. In these works Murphy cuts to the quick of a cultural repertoire of self-annihilation enacted in monotonous personal wastelands, as he depicts the morose and predictable route of revelry from punch-ups and passing-out to the cab ride home and the cold coming of the morning after. In a grotesque nightmare of events, hallucinatory, distorted figures, including a monstrously phallus haired Medusa, emerge indistinctly from murky backgrounds charged with unexpected colour, thick impasto clumps of paint juxtaposed with matte stain and lyrical outcrops of glossy swirls and flourishes smeared and smudged in foreground relief.