Wil Murray: Maximalist Mayhem
Wil Murray Baby Ghost From the 1900s Says Beat It With Your Chain 2009
Colourful, exuberant and over-the-top, Wil Murray’s wonderfully overstuffed paintings are gaining increasing notice across the nation—the Calgary-born, Montreal-based artist won honourable mention in 2008’s RBC Canadian Painting Competition, and his work was also featured in the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art’s 2008 exhibition for national top-painters tome Carte Blanche Vol. 2. The accolades are deserved. Not content to turn his canvases into armatures simply for material processes that include, as Galerie Push’s exhibition text puts it, “moulding, pouring, lifting, folding and intertwining,” Murray also weighs down his artworks with amusingly convoluted titles, like Baby Ghost from the 1900s Says Beat it With Your Chain and If They Bottled Sex With The Curator I Would Buy It But Spill It On The Way Home. The results of all of Murray’s physical and intellectual additions are unwieldy, but charmingly so, resulting in a maximalist approach to painting that balances cool abstraction with warm absurdities. Most definitely worth a look, eyeballs open wide. (5264 boul St Laurent, Montreal QC)
Wil Murray Ouija’s The Colour of My True Love's Hair 2009
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