Murray Clarke
(United Kingdom, 1992)
Murray Clarke lives and works in London, England. Clarke graduated from Kingston School of Art in 2019 with an MA in Fine Art. His work explores the dichotomy of emotions surrounding the mass marketing and consumption of fabrics and garments. Through her work, Clarke dissects and questions our attitudes and feelings towards such luxury goods by creating paintings that are at once warm and welcoming, yet deceptively cold and superficial.
By duplicating images multiple times in his works, he winks at the mass-produced images characteristic of industries such as advertising. In this way, his work opposes the traditional view of painting as a single subject, incapable of being reproduced, as he presents us with the same image painted over and over again, moving further and further away from its figurative nature. Painted in a realistic style, the paintings lack the artist's presence, so that an almost mechanical coldness usurps the initial warmth and leads us to question our own desires.