Jan Murray, Figurine (pink), 2023. Oil on linen, 173 x 107cm. Courtesy: the artist and Charles Nodrum Gallery, Melbourne.

Charles Nodrum Gallery presents a new body of work by Jan Murray, a development from her trio of paintings included in Melbourne Now at the NGV earlier this year, and from her 2020 exhibition Inverso.

Dr Barb Bolt writes in her introductory essay: “…Puffers have become the lingua franca in the garment world. They are warm and versatile and cross culture and genders. It is these latter qualities of ambiguity that comes into play in the current exhibition, Figura… While these paintings are paintings of puffer jackets, Murray offers that from the beginning she saw them as, and called them, figurines. When she hung the jackets to paint them, they presented themselves in different ways—as a kind-of-gesture suggestive of an emotional state. She notes that the work seems to gather interpretations from different people: they could be “read” as a woman in a hijab or Muslim man with a puffer over his thobe. When I first saw the paintings, I “felt” samurai and was also reminded of the painted terracotta warriors from the Quin dynasty which I had seen at the NGV in 2019. Nevertheless, there is “something” already in the paintings, an animation that we, as viewers, riff off and which takes us on flights of fancy. This is part of the magic. But it still begs the question: how did these figures, this life get into the paintings in the first place?”

Opening Event: Saturday 14 October, 3 – 5pm, including drinks with the artist.

Follow this artist