Bill Lowe Gallery’s “Todd Murphy: Wink,” on display through Nov. 4, presents a survey of Murphy’s final decade of work (he died from cancer, at the age of 57, in 2020). It does not pretend to be a full retrospective, and this is understandable, given the breadth of the artist’s oeuvre almost from the moment of his emergence in Atlanta, fresh out of the University of Georgia.
Murphy worshipped cultural superstars, and was regarded as one, from the moment of his first shows in Atlanta in the late 1980s. His paintings of such high-culture heroes as Samuel Beckett were reproduced on T-shirts and sold at the opening of one.
Credit: Mike Jensen
Credit: Mike Jensen
He quickly evolved from expressionistic portraiture to immense Rauschenberg-like photo-based paintings in which tar or tarry pigments were overlaid on Plexiglas. (One of these works, King Plow from 1992, is included in this show because of its horse subject matter.) It soon became evident that Murphy’s range of interests was as enormous as the range of his diversely defined aesthetics.
The late digital print small editions (two or three prints) in the 2012-2019 “Wink” series, in their scale and composition, are as pleasurably disconcerting as their subject matter, somewhat abstracted African American jockeys with their racehorses. (In actuality, the works are digital recompositions of formal horse and rider paintings by George Stubbs and others.) Even more disconcerting here is the earlier sculpture representing the bones of a horse’s foreleg, photographed placed at the base of a bell-shaped skirt sculpture. (Both sculptures are in the exhibition, in separate locations.)
Credit: Mike Jensen
Credit: Mike Jensen
The title of the series derives from the career of African American jockey James “Jimmy” Winkfield, known as “Wink,” whose horse won the Kentucky Derby in 1902. After the Derby victory, Winkfield fled segregation to live and work in Europe.
The unique print titled “Wink” is a particularly daring use of digital recomposition, as the jockey and his horse appear behind a sea of umbrellas. In all the works in this series, Murphy has rendered the faces anonymous with magic marker before rephotographing and digitally compositing.
Born in Chicago but raised from childhood in rural Georgia, Murphy was aware of his peculiar status as a white artist, but unhesitatingly addressed controversial issues of race, focusing on the difficult legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.
An entire 1998-2003 series was given the title “Sally Hemmings,” after the enslaved woman who bore several children with Thomas Jefferson. A 2014-2020 series, “Voyage,” juxtaposes African traditional sculptures with Catholic devotional objects, both in photographs and in arrangements on shelves.
The arrangements in the “Wink” exhibit are particularly powerful because of the juxtapositions of subject, texture and scale; the photographs of individual objects, arranged on the wall in a linear series, make less of an impact.
Combined with such things as the dresses represented in photographs and sculpture in “Murmurations,” 2013-2019, the works in the exhibition well deserve the insightful catalogue essays written by the well-known cultural critics Seph Rodney and Peter Frank.
They are certain to stir fresh interest in Atlanta audiences for whom Murphy is a legend but not a recently viewed reality.
VISUAL ART REVIEW
Todd Murphy: “Wink”
Through Nov. 4. Free. 764 Miami Circle, Suite 210, Atlanta. 404-352-8114, lowegallery.com.
Credit: ArtsATL
Credit: ArtsATL
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ArtsATL (www.artsatl.org), is a nonprofit organization that plays a critical role in educating and informing audiences about metro Atlanta’s arts and culture. Founded in 2009, ArtsATL’s goal is to help build a sustainable arts community contributing to the economic and cultural health of the city.
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