Ben Murray’s work operates between painting’s long history of image-making and the immediate vanishing of images in film, Murray’s new body of work is in direct conversation with works created by pioneers of Avant Garde cinematography, such as Rose Lowder, Hollis Frampton, Joseph Cornell, and Steve McQueen. Layered marks embedded on both sides of raw unstretched muslin utilize a range of opacities, transparencies, and refractive hues, as if to composite a myriad of enigmatic moments through deposits of paint. Each mark, a record of the artist’s physical movements through his recollected history, while also paralleling durational movements in the films from which each work's brilliance is inspired.
Murray (b. 1977, Gary, IN) earned his MFA from University of Illinois at Chicago in 2013 and his BFA from Herron School of Art and Design, Indianapolis in 2011. Murray is currently the Adjunct Assistant Professor, Indiana University Northwest, Gary, IN.
Murray was the 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 Kaplan A.I.R Exhibitions, curated by John Neff (2013); Gallery 400 (2013); The Armory Show, New York (2015); Cleve Carney Gallery, College of DuPage, Glen Ellyn, IL (2018); University of Illinois at Chicago Galleries (2018); Hyde Park Art Center, Chicago (2016, 2019); and Exgirlfriend Gallery, Berlin (2019); Lubeznik Center for the Arts, Michigan City, IN (2022). His third solo exhibition with moniquemeloche opened in January 2021. He currently lives and works in Gary, IN.