"Nina Murdoch: In the Dark"
2009-05-20 until 2009-06-05
FAS Contemporary Art
London, , UK United Kingdom

In the Dark is the first solo show of work by artist Nina Murdoch since she won the Threadneedle Prize, the UK’s largest art prize in September last year. 2,700 works by 1,600 artists were submitted for the Threadneedle prize in 2008. 71 works were selected for the finalists’ exhibition at the Mall Galleries by a panel of jurors who included art critics Richard Cork, Brian Sewell and William Packer and contemporary art dealer Angela Flowers. Nina Murdoch’s large-scale study of a city wall, Untitled, won the £25,000 award after a televised debate and extensive popular vote. This work along with a new series of paintings will be on show at FAS this Spring.

Nina searches and revisits parts of London for subject matter, 'mining for light' as she calls it: looking for rare shafts of sunlight that bring to life and transform from the mundane the city’s architectural framework. These light shafts occur all the time, but each one may be an event that happens for only a fleeting moment when the sun is in a particular place, much like the way the sunlight hits the stone circle at Stongehenge on the Summer Solstice. Murdoch photographs these elusive moments of light and mixes these images with those from her memory and imagination to form the basis of these new paintings.

"... her own paintings are charged with a simultaneous consciousness of decay and survival. That is why her images are so potent. A nightmarish alienation coexists with a seductive apprehension of light. At once menacing and luminous, Murdoch's art reflects the ambivalence running through our own response to the lonely allure of urban existence." Richard Cork, Art Critic

Nina makes only around eight large paintings a year as the process she adopts is so painstaking. She paints on gesso, a plaster-like surface used since the early renaissance, and constantly experiments with the painting process, making her own paints with egg and pigment. She applies layer after layer of paint on the surface and focuses very intensely on the paint itself until she achieves the desired tension between dark and light. The results of her labour are spectacular: large ethereal empty spaces with dramatic lighting and loaded with human presence. The new works in this exhibition mark a shift in her work – away from large perspectives and towards detail in both content and technique.

"Both modern and timeless, Nina Murdoch's pictures are full of straight lines – the shaft of fading sunlight, the edge of a skyscraper, the hard glint of a railway line – and glazed with a kind of shining haze. Nina Murdoch's city is our city, recognisable and familiar, but glimpsed in a dream, or remembered far from home. Seven years on, and I am still in love with her work" Tony Parsons, Art Critic and Broadcaster

Nina Murdoch is a graduate of the Slade School of Art and the Royal Academy Schools. She lives and works in Clapham, South London. She has won six art awards as well as the Threadneedle prize. Her works have been shown at the Royal Academy, Guerlain Foundation, Paris, the Flemings Wyfold Foundation and the National Gallery.

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