Aileen Murphy

In her distinctive approach to painting, Murphy generates imagery through a combination of slow layering and fast applications of oil paint, animating a delicate urgency and sparking sensations of both epiphany and discomfort. Fictive characters are the focal points of Murphy’s paintings. The figures fluctuate under the viewer’s eye, revealing and concealing themselves behind and via the materiality of the medium. The paintings have evolved through Murphy’s experimental exploration of paint. In her hands, painting is an act of imaginative action—colour and gesture are live wires. The images committed to canvas arrive there through an ongoing process of reinvention. A true identity is revealed only to then conceal itself and re-emerge as something other but no less true. ...

Deborah Schamoni is a contemporary art gallery based in Munich, Germany. Situated in a 1970s villa, the gallery is able to offer its artists a spacious white cube, flooded with daylight and opening up to a greened outdoor area, as well as an independent smaller room. Since its founding in 2013, the gallery has focused on showing and supporting emerging international artists and it presents an exceptional program that unites international positions with a subversive and self-reflexive approach to art making considering the complexity of human coexistence. The gallery often stages the first shows of upcoming international artists in Germany. The program is developing a distinct profile with artists like Maryam Hoseini, Yong Xiang Li, and Flaka Haliti, who investigate the sociopolitical conditions of queer identity and gender, and share a diasporic experience in their works. Beyond its international focus, the gallery has been playing an important part in establishing Munich as a prominent destination for contemporary art and its discourses. ...