An Te Liu and Jemima Murphy: Tracing

Announcing An Te Liu and Jemima Murphy: Tracing, presented by Victoria Miro Projects and Anat Ebgi. On view at Anat Ebgi, 4859 Fountain Ave, Los Angeles from February 19 - March 29.

Tracing includes sculptures by Taiwanese-born, Canadian artist An Te Liu and paintings by London-based artist Jemima Murphy. Rooted in a lineage of modernist sculpture and abstract painting, Liu and Murphy explore themes of belonging, nostalgia, and memory. Distinct in form, each artist follows a process led by their search for something to be revealed, uncovering histories, pulling back the curtain of subconsciousness. Tracing finds a sublime clarity and spaciousness through suspension, gravity, and repetition. United by performative and gestural underpinnings, their sustained fascinations, constant retellings, and transformations fuse the present with the past.

Liu’s sculptures take their origins from objects intended to protect and enhance. Working in bronze, ceramic, and concrete, his sculptures are often composed and cast from foam packing materials, sports equipment, and other collected relics from the artist’s life. There is a uniting of the ordinary with the mythic and a convergence of the natural and manmade. Citing the history of Modernism and its hubristic desire for purity and refinement, Liu’s transgenerational signals of the body and memory mutate and devolve. Other works make reference to architectural forms, such as the stacked and repeating form of Wúxiàn, which alludes to pagodas of East and Southeast Asia, and takes its shape from the Chinese takeout box. Inspired by histories, Liu’s interventions are suffused with allusions to both personal and archetypal meanings.

Murphy’s dynamic abstractions draw on the physicality of paint in tandem with the psychological and emotional potential of color, gesture and memory. In works such as Unlocked or Untamed, a linen ground acts as foil to saturated hues; with each painted layer mirroring the accumulation of collective emotional memory. Murphy’s background in theater informs her process; in particular her approach to gesture, the interaction between artist, material and the action of myriad techniques in which paint is poured and dripped in washes as well as applied in urgent, rhythmic strokes. Retaining the ‘live’ quality of performance and a character of openness, her work is poised between the intuitive and the improvised, with brush marks coalescing in cloud-like congregation or floral burst.