Ben Murray

Ben Murray’s atmospheric images depict banal objects as transformed by the effects of memory, mood and painterly improvisation. Murray often presents large-scale oil paintings, posing as vernacular symbols of experience from the artist’s suburban Indiana hometown, the land formerly known as Centerville. His paintings and works on paper display the layering of attempts to claim images in stages of constant flux. Placing the memory-derived work in the context of various historical settings, the artist intends to acknowledge the complicated relationships that image-making within painting has and can have for how we see and edit the past.

Murray was a 2014 Artist In Residence at the Bemis Center for Contemporary Art in Omaha, Nebraska and a 2012 MFA Resident at Ox-Bow in Saugatuck, Michigan.  He has exhibited at Northwestern University, Kaplan A.I.R Exhibitions, curated by John Neff; UIC Gallery 400, and “Revisiting Undomesticated” at Design Cloud, Chicago, and Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago.

Courtesy of Monique Meloche Gallery