OPENING TODAY
HANNAH MURGATROYD
An Unbidden Quest
7 May - 8 June 2025
Private View 7 May 2025, 6 - 8pm
Presented by Blackbird Rook
In collaboration with the Tom and Chai Hall Collection
In residence at The Florence Trust
Holy Trinity, Cloudesley Square, London N1 0HN
We Are Out Here Living Under The Sun, 2021-2025
The female body, here, is both intimate and political - painted, fragmented, enduring. Nearing fifty, Murgatroyd paints through her own odyssey, tracing wanderings, ruptures, and joys. She paints obsolescence not as disappearance, but as lived experience. A woman is present and vanishing, central and overlooked, powerful and vulnerable. Her work speaks to a broader contemporary moment - one in which the autonomy of women's bodies remains under scrutiny, and midlife remains largely unseen in contemporary painting.
The act of painting is essential. The brush and palette are not just tools, but charged objects - vessels of survival, of wry defiance. Murgatroyd brings together two painterly lineages: her landscapes are shaped by gestural abstraction, ancient Chinese painting, and contemporary approaches to the land; her figures draw from Cézanne, Manet, Beckmann, Baselitz, and others. The distinct vocabularies of abstraction and figuration - once opposing poles - are reconciled on a single canvas. One language for landscape, another for the body - their edges meeting, fraying, folding into one another.
To paint by hand, to see from the corner of a dreaming eye - this is a form of resistance. A slowing of time. A way to assert presence in a world that accelerates, digitises, forgets. The figures in these paintings do not disappear. They remain - embodied, insistent - protectors of something unspoken but vital: the child who will inherit the world. This is a show about endurance. About the body as a site of history, imagination, and survival. About the unbidden quests that shape us, whether we recognise them or not.
Hannah Murgatroyd (b. 1976) is a British painter based in the UK. She studied at the Royal College of Art and the Royal Drawing School. Her work has been exhibited widely, including in Women Can't Paint, curated by Marcus Harvey, Monster/Beauty, curated by Marcelle Joseph at Lychee One, as well as at OHSH Projects, Alice Black, Cob Gallery, and Von Goetz. She was highly commended in the Contemporary British Painting Prize and included in the Exeter Contemporary Painting Prize. Murgatroyd's work is held in private and public collections in the UK and beyond. She is currently a mentor at Turps Art.