Themes of nationality

Mar 28 2008 by Gordon Dalton, Western Mail

MIKE Murray’s exhibition at g39 in Cardiff is the second in the gallery’s solo season.

Murray is a multi-disciplinary artist whose work refers to place, nature and technology.

He considers himself to be a Welsh artist having spent the majority of his life in Wales and having learnt the language, despite being born over the North Wales border in Birkenhead.

The themes of nationality are subtly eased out in his work, such as Broader Disputes, in which he has taken a dead tree that has breached and crossed the fence on which it was resting – the tree and the “border” become one object.

More images of trees crop up in other works. Murray took photos of a park, which were then digitally manipulated and placed back into the same location. After two months of being out in the open, the work will be installed in the gallery with the resulting weather and graffiti damage plain to see.

Computer animations and crude mechanical objects, such as desks, fill the gallery, removed of any sense of ownership or history, exaggerating Murray’s rootlessness and crossovers between nature and technology.

This should be an ambitious exhibition that showcases one of Wales’ most interesting young artists.

IF you’ve not already caught Grennan & Sperandio’s show at Oriel Davies in Newtown then it’s another one that’s well worth a visit.

The pair will be familiar names to most for their collaborative work and they have been commissioned to make new work about Gwendoline and Margaret Davies, who bequeathed their major art collections to the National Museum of Wales.

Becoming Modern features 11 new paintings which will be shown alongside six major works from the Davies Bequest.

Grennan & Sperandio examined diaries the sisters kept during their travels through Italy with the resulting paintings weaving together historic and contemporary imagery, scientific diagrams, fashion plates and patterns. As a further twist the pictures have not been painted by the artists themselves, but instead have been painted by anonymous workshop painters.

The work from the Davies Bequest includes two views of Venice by Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne’s Provençal Landscape, paintings by Berthe Morisot and Camille Pissarro, and Degas’ bronze study, Dressed Dancer, which are obviously well worth another viewing.

The exhibition as whole, with its mixture of new and old, asks questions around artistic authenticity and originality, the birth of modernity and our 21st century view of art from the past. Grennan & Sperandio always bring a cheeky twist to their work and this should be essential viewing.