Wild Reveries

Anat Ebgi is pleased to present Wild Reveries, an exhibition of new paintings by British artist Jemima Murphy. This is Murphy’s first solo exhibition in New York and second occasion exhibiting with the gallery. Jemima Murphy’s painted fields of shifting impressions emerge from an attentiveness to the physicality of paint and rhythmic mark making. Gesturing toward the natural world, Murphy describes her works as reimagined landscapes. Her works evoke cycles of blooming, drifting, and dispersal found in the natural world, while resisting fixed and literal depictions. Instead, they propose landscapes of sensation, where touch, tempo, and chromatic intensity break open new modes of perception. Rooted in the long lineage of British and European sensorial abstraction, Murphy employs a recurring vocabulary of brush strokes. Sheer, organic, dripping, these motifs repeat with variation across multiple canvases building expansive, porous fields. Through this process of accumulation and layering, her compositions become defined by density and motion, aligning her practice with the legacies of transatlantic postwar abstraction. The compositions behave like unfolding events, stages upon which innumerable gestures accumulate into dramatic, choreographed rhythms. For Murphy—who studied at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in New York prior to completing her fine art coursework in London—the act of painting is inseparable from understanding movement. This includes the physicality of applying paint to canvas as well as the embodied movement of the viewing subject. Sweeping arcs, looping strokes, and cascading spume index the body’s velocity and the passage of time. The works in Wild Reveries retain the ‘live’ quality of performance and a character of openness, poised between the intuitive and the improvised, with marks coalescing in cloud-like congregation. In tandem with the physicality of her medium, Murphy draws on the psychological and emotional potential of color. As a central character in these abstract dramas, color serves as emotional register and structural force. Dominant chromatic keys anchor each painting; tonal gradations of violet, ultramarine, magenta, or moss green, determine mood and atmosphere. These quite saturated passages sit, twist, and hover within translucent washes, meeting and mixing in the frothy and luminous surfaces. Jemima Murphy (b. 1992, London, UK) graduated from City & Guilds of London Art School. Murphy’s work was the subject of a two-person exhibition Tracing organized by Anat Ebgi and Victoria Miro Projects (2025); and solo exhibitions at Victoria Miro Projects, Online (2024) and Edji Gallery, Brussels, Belgium (2023). Group exhibitions include Coming Up Roses, Berntson Bhattacharjee, London, UK (2025); A New British Modernity, Burberry Seoul Flagship, Seoul, Korea (2024); lbf @ the lake, lbf contemporary, Muskoka, Canada (2024); Gesture & Form: Women in Abstraction, Almine Rech, New York, USA (2024); In The Know, Show, Green Family Art Foundation, Texas, USA (2024); Something Woman* This Way Comes, Patricia Low Contemporary, Gstaad, Switzerland (2024); Beautiful Twisted Mind, Mint Gallery, Munich, Germany (2023); and Beyond Figuration: Then and Now, Gillian Jason Gallery, London, UK (2023). Her work has been acquired by various public and private collections including Midas Collection, Los Angeles, USA; Green Family Art Foundation, Texas, USA; The Nixon Collection, London, UK; and The Scalpel Building Collection, London, UK. Murphy lives and works in London, UK.