David Murphy’s paintings are distinguished above all by their extraordinary variety. Over a career spanning several decades, he has worked in oils, acrylics, alkyds, watercolour and mixed media, moving freely between figurative painting and abstraction, and between very different degrees of realism and expressive distortion. Portraits, self-portraits, and couples engaging in sex appear alongside landscapes, abstractions, and more experimental compositions.

The works selected here give some sense of that range. Some retain a recognisable relationship to their photographic sources, with figures and settings clearly articulated through simplified planes of colour. Others are transformed by vigorous brushwork, intensified colour and increasingly broad treatment until the subject approaches abstraction. Murphy moves from a restrained monochromatic handling to extraordinarily vivid combinations of blues, reds, greens and yellows without committing to any single stylistic formula.

Photography clearly provides an important thread running through much of the work. Murphy uses photographs from newspapers, magazines, books, films, television and the internet, as well as his own photographs, as starting points for paintings. He has described these images not as templates to be copied, but as the inspiration for his own subjective response. Line, colour and texture are manipulated to make the finished painting something distinct from its source.

Murphy’s output is notable for its sheer scale – he has produced thousands of paintings over more than thirty years. What emerges from this prolific practice is not a single Murphy style, but a remarkably diverse and continually evolving body of work, united by the intensity with which he responds to his chosen subjects.