Idris Murphy Survey exhibition - Backblocks

This survey catches a great Australian painter at the height of his powers. Born in 1949, Idris Murphy developed deep roots in the history of painting as well as a profound feeling for the natural environment. Murphy’s idiom transcends “either/or” — it is indistinguishably landscape painting and painterly abstraction all at once. Arising from a sort of improvisatory incantation, the most vivid metaphors of land, space, light, mood and feeling seem to coalesce spontaneously and unbidden.

This happens even when Murphy’s pictorial means strike us as most improbable and outlandish: recent paintings make abundant use of metallic pigments and wildly abstruse colour combinations. Despite their bizarre and casual-looking primitivism, each painting resolves brilliantly into its surface and shape, and exudes a rare poetry of “place”.

Terence Maloon (curator)

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Idris Murphy is one of the most original landscape painters in this country, and landscape is one of only two areas in which Australia may be said to have made a unique contribution to world art. The other is Indigenous art, which is finally making its presence felt in the international marketplace.

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Here is an artist with his own stubborn vision, who paints the landscape as he sees it, even if nobody else sees it in the same way. In time, he hopes we will come around to his point of view, or at least appreciate the integrity of his efforts.

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Murphy is not trying to create an exact record of the landscape – he allows the mood and atmosphere of a place to find distant echoes within his own sensibility.

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What seems at first profoundly unnatural, is revealed as merely another way of portraying what is most natural – to get beneath the skin of appearances and unearth the fundamental character of the country. To be more literary, one might call it the genius loci - the spirit of place.

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The colours Murphy uses are as much a product of his mind as they are of the landscape. In this sense he is more of a Symbolist than an Impressionist, relying on the ‘inner eye’ rather than the retina. He takes the data of the physical world and sifts through it, like a prospector panning for gold, seeking to capture what is most valuable. He is not merely responding to what he sees, but to the feelings a scene engenders in his own peculiar psyche – and I’m not using the word “peculiar” in a derogatory manner.

John McDonald, The Sydney Morning Herald,  March 10, 2023 - Read the full review