review: craig murray-orr

Landscape 13

Before viewing Craig Murray-Orr’s solo show at the Ingleby gallery, there is a fact everyone must know: Murray-Orr was born in New Zeland, but has spent two thirds of his life living in Hampstead, London. Although ostensibly pointless, this fact is necessary in understanding its impact on the artist’s practice. Despite his time in London, it is the artist’s memories of the terrain of his home-country which have influenced his forty-year career.

The exhibition is comprised of twenty small landscape paintings and four sculptures, three of which are varyingly sized mahogany guns. It is undeniable that these guns steal the show; each one elegantly carved from a single piece of wood. Upstairs, the largest of the three, Tribute to Florence Baker, looks as though it has been made for the space, despite it being completed over ten years ago. Celebrating the wife of explorer Samuel Baker, the sculpture is a testament to Murray-Orr’s mastery of simplicity, merging the horizontal form of a woman with the refined barrel of a gun.

Whilst the stature of Murray-Orr’s sculptural pieces dominate the galleries, twenty watercolour paintings hang from the walls. Nearly entirely monochrome, with hints of deep purple and dirty grey, these pieces are a jumble of childhood recollections. With a restrictive colour palette, the landscapes are barely distinguishable from one another; Landscape 9 becomes the ‘stormier’ one, Landscape 10 is the one with three colours, and Landscape 13 resembles the surface of the moon.

Ultimately, while the simplicity of Murray-Orr’s sculptures is their redeeming feature, it is the downfall of his paintings. Their subtlety, and the inaccessibility of his childhood memories creates a series of works that are emotively unreachable, leaving us with bland, monotonous abstracted forms of someone else’s reminiscence.

first published for the skinny

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