Portrait of Conor Murgatroyd in his studio (image courtesy of the artist)
WOAW Gallery is delighted to present “Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick Tock”, a solo exhibition by London-based painter Conor Murgatroyd. Featuring 11 paintings made in the first six months of this year, the show centers around Murgatroyd himself - of his life, his thoughts, and his general practice. Capturing the banality of everyday life in a surrealistic manner, Murgatroyd’s exhibition encapsulates the evolution of his paintings through a carefully constructed allegorical still life, bringing together a myriad of characters and objects as he builds his history through emotional memories.
Murgatroyd titled the exhibition in reference to the transience of time, a testament to the years he spent cultivating the different techniques that comprise his artistic practice. He had always made reference to historical paintings in his works, drawing inspiration from old masters such as Italian painter Vincenzo Catena and English artist Henry Moore in order to skilfully encapsulate his emotions and his consciousness. “This show highlights my love of referencing, and the role it plays in my practice in general,” said Murgatroyd, “It also focuses more on the meanings of the different references that I’m making.” With this series of compositions, he slowly unravels his influences that span across centuries, spotlighting his lived experience in works where objective history and subjective memories coexist in the form of captured moments.
Installation shot of "Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick Tock"
“The two big pieces are more of a spotlight on references for me, but it's important to know that the show is not just about references cos that would be silly,” he said.
Comfort Of The Evening (2024) welcomes visitors to a scene in Murgatroyd’s living room in London, its interior decorated with vibrant colors and Cubist furniture. “The title is self-explanatory - a lot of my works are about the feelings you have in life, and my work is basically a filter for my emotions and feelings and thoughts and beliefs,” said Murgatroyd.
Comfort Of The Evening, Conor Murgatroyd, 2024
This particular painting, more than others, is built up of various different artistic references. A portrait in reference to Pablo Picasso’s Portrait of Olga in Armchair (1918) is placed next to his kitchen window. The arches that section his composition into harmonious proportions were inspired by old Renaissance paintings - one of his favorite periods of art. To the right, Magritte’s canvas from The Human Condition (La condition humaine) (1933) melts with the view outside his window. “What Magritte was trying to represent with this specific theme, which he reproduced in many different paintings, was the difficulty of painting to represent an idea,” said the artist, “And that to me really is something that I constantly think about, not just in my own work but in art and culture.”
The comforting feeling of safety, serenity, and peace that Murgatroyd finds within his home is the very foundation of his work and his life, from which he combines with his imagination to create the final image. The individual objects and figures and artistic references fill the space of his living room until they are indistinguishable from Murgatroyd himself, until they too make a home in his life, becoming a part of him as natural as the passing of time.
The Functioning Brain, Conor Murgatroyd, 2024
The British painter also moves away from composing real life settings on his canvas. Two particular works, The Functioning Brain (2024) and The Thinking Man’s Dream (After Miró) (2024), were drawn solely based on Murgatroyd’s imagination, the swathes of pink, blue, and orange a visualization of the environment within his mind. Each idea Murgatroyd visually represents on the canvas interacts with each other within the context of his personal experiences. “There’s two pieces in the show that feature these abstract colored lines in the back, and they represent the inner workings of my imagination,” said Murgatroyd. “They’re sort of an attempt to capture what that looks like as I think about these paintings as I make them - I suppose all of the paintings are not painted from actual reality but are painted from my imagination of my thoughts.”
Time is a concurrent theme throughout each work, the sentiment echoing through the “Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick Tock” of the exhibition title and making itself known in the form of antique clocks. A lover of antiquity, many of the featured pieces were from Murgatroyd’s grandmother. “I suppose [antiques] talked more to me in a way, like things being still in time, and they are sort of just existing and out-surviving all of us you know?” he said.
Reasons To Work, Conor Murgatroyd, 2024
He highlights one antique clock that appears in many of his works - a tall, hourglass-shaped timepiece, its body displaying different sceneries in different paintings. “These clocks in particular are 18th century American clocks from an antiques shop that I saw, and I got obsessed with them as the originals have these scenes inside of them - obviously not the same scenes as these, and I got fascinated by how they can transport you to a different place. I wanted to use them as portals to different places.” In The Functioning Brain (2024), the antique clock displays a setting sun, a reflection of Murgatroyd’s personal memories. In Reasons To Work (2024), where Murgatroyd reflects on his personal achievements and expresses a desire to focus on life and its irony, the large antique clock offers a happy scene with his family - an intimate window that frames his compositions with a gentle reminder and a lasting impact on the human soul.
Installation shot of "Tick Tock, Tick Tock, Tick Tock"
“A quite interesting thing about this show that I felt quite accomplished by because it's the first time I mixed the two themes of reality and elements of surrealism in my work in a much more here and present way,” said Murgatroyd. “Maybe I’ll develop that more but right now I feel like it’s such a nice body of work - it’s quite coherent, it’s quite consistent, and they all speak to each other.”
“A lot of times my work speaks to me about things I wasn’t aware of. It teaches me about myself and is the purest form of expression for me, this show did that really well so to me that indicates something good.”