Marta Murray (b. 1996) is a Chicago born painter currently based in Philadelphia.
She earned her BFA from New York University in 2018, and is a current MFA candidate at the Tyler School of Art. Murray’s work has been exhibited across Chicago, New York City, the Hudson Valley, Berlin, and Philadelphia.
My recent large scale works on paper are sprawling and stylistically diverse compositions that combine drawing, painting and collage. I begin with a loaded visual reference, be it a page torn from a mid-century fashion magazine, an iconic film poster, or a test image used by tech companies. In some cases, these cultural artifacts are reduced to shorthand through a process of recontextualization, flattened into symbols of surveillance and control. Often though, they are scaled up and exploded, scribbled over and diagrammed. Due to the size of these works — similar to that of a projector screen or classroom map — and their sporadic concentrations of intricate detail, they require both a wide lens and close looking. My work is heavily influenced by the camera as a tool of capture as well as an agent of disruption.
I am drawn to images that have the lacquer of ‘newness’ for their time, and with that, a tragic sense of ephemerality. In the case of advertising’s violent portrayals and exclusions, I find irony in looking backward, noting the cyclical nature of fashion and politics, the dual sense of optimism and paranoia that fuels America. My work is a space to unpack my emotional and intellectual responses to injustice. It is a practice built from equal parts disillusionment and discovery, where I can visualize the dissonance between my personal experience and a sense of national imagination.
