The Autumn Auction 2020

Queen and King presents a paradoxical musing on traditional ideas of gender hierarchy, not least within the history of painting. Callum Murphy explains, “A ‘baby’ pink diamond sits dominantly above a slightly smaller ‘baby’ blue in the foreground, seemingly connected by a jaunty excuse for a grid. Behind a screen of blue circles faintly visible is a more accurate grid of squares reminiscent of a chessboard, bringing to mind the roles of ‘Queen and King’ within the game - the far superior Queen the key to bringing down the opponent, whilst the defensive aim of the game is to protect the feeble King at all costs.”

Callum Murphy’s explorative paintings straddle the figurative and abstract, intertwining gestural drawing with carefully rendered patterns and blurring the distinction between foreground and background through painterly illusion. Murphy’s paintings offer glimpses of recognition, interpreting borrowed elements from the historical art canon and often playing on traditional genres of painting, whilst remaining deliberately ambiguous. Through this Murphy aims to analyse the mechanics of painting, challenging and extending the possibilities of the medium.