The Brooklyn Rail

Limbs, clothes, light reflected off of them, the tables and beds for sleeping and eating, desks for working—these are among the compelling ingredients of Catherine Murphy’s exacting and affecting paintings and drawings. Murphy touches on the multiple genres of painting in ways that both surprise and delight the viewer.

Consider the painting Under the Table (2022). It hints at legs encased in soft, patterned fabrics. At ease under a wood table and slyly revealed in a staged setting that confounds our viewing and imaginations, these legs give a subtle glimpse into an interior domestic life. Caught in passing, the work provokes our curiosity and as we peer beneath the table we might imagine the suggestion of a Renaissance church scene with two nuns conversing. Similarly, the landscape appears in illusive cameos, as in the painting Nine Over Nine (2024) which depicts a snowy landscape marked with tire tracks and shadings through carefully crafted brown and green windowpanes. Strangest of all in this exhibition is the dark and somewhat gestural painting Still Living (2024) which shows the interior of a dead old tree that reveals amid its striations a secret face, like that in a slightly scary fairy tale.

In the painstakingly marked drawings stories are told in textures and colors remotely reminiscent of Goltzius’s intricacies and the colors and folds of Renaissance drapery, the blues and rust tones of Sienese painting, and the work of mid 20^th century American muralists like Stuart Davis. The tones and complexity lend a warmth and intimacy to the interior scene.

Inner and external landscape meet up in the brilliantly structured Harry’s Office (2023)—a tightly composed collection of compressed papers assembled willy-nilly atop a desk stretching out like layers of hills. It’s an image of piles of thought and work in progress. The geometric curves in the painstakingly-rendered graphite drawing Scalloped (2024) call to mind a bowl of Cézanne’s fruits as if on a table surrounded by bushy vegetation on a hill (perhaps). What is impressive here is how many stories can be suggested in one image.

Murphy has pointed out “A story has to have an idea.” Yes, but then again, so do we, the viewers. It’s the only way to see what we’re looking at. The variety in this show is rather startling. It opens with the very representational, almost illustrational Aside (2023), showing two women, their heads close together speaking, it appears, furtively while backed by the body of a man standing between them. The picture is enigmatic, almost disturbing, and shockingly literal in the context of Murphy’s oeuvre. Are the women lovers? Mother and daughter? Is the man the subject of their whisperings? And where are they? In bed?

But then there are the carefully limned depictions of scarved heads seen from the rear with images of the likes of leopard spots and sailing ships, and simply plaids. Could the heads be those of tourists, immigrants, grandparents? What, we wonder, are they telling us, and who are the hidden characters describing?

Finally, what are closest in my mind to Murphy’s signature works are her poignant portrayals of worn household items—pillows bearing the users’ indentations, and intimate renderings, like Double Bed (2022), a painting in two parts, where the bedding and the exposed sleeping positions of the intimate nocturnal inhabitants touch on the personalities of the two and their likely cozy relationship.