Todd Murphy’s Gesamtkunstwerk required not things to say so much as ways to say them, and the arc of his art takes us from declaration to account to poem.

— By Peter Frank, Los Angeles, August 2022

Throughout his career Murphy was cited time and again as a “storyteller” and a “narrative artist.” But he never told his stories in a straightforward pictorial (much less illustrative) manner; and by time he left the South he had evolved into a kind of image-poet, inferring ideas at least as much as spinning or elaborating on tales.

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Catalog Essay Wink Exhibition Johnson Lowe Gallery
Los Angeles, 2022
More and more, the tone and texture of his imagery became characters themselves, even as Murphy’s purview maintained its epic proportions

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Catalog Essay Wink Exhibition Johnson Lowe Gallery
Los Angeles, 2022
It wasn’t so much that he was assuming the mantle of a bard; in fact, he was always nearing that galvanizing position but always steering clear of its full implications.

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Catalog Essay Wink Exhibition Johnson Lowe Gallery
Los Angeles, 2022
Rather, Murphy was looking for a lyric voice, the lyric voice that kept breaking through the surface until he found the chiaroscuro, visual and spiritual, that could fully liberate it.

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Catalog Essay Wink Exhibition Johnson Lowe Gallery
Los Angeles, 2022
Todd Murphy’s Gesamtkunstwerk required not things to say so much as ways to say them, and the arc of his art takes us from declaration to account to poem.

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Catalog Essay Wink Exhibition Johnson Lowe Gallery
Los Angeles, 2022
Had he been able to give us another 20-30 years of work, Murphy would have found his way to music, too. As it is, his every artwork is a breaking into song -- into the soul of a song, and into a song of the soul

PETER FRANK
TODD MURPHY: BREADTH OF A POET
Catalog Essay Wink Exhibition Johnson Lowe Gallery
Los Angeles, 2022

Link to Department of Botanical and Biological Studies---- Coastal Botanicals

Link to see botanical and biological studies

Link to see Department of Botanical and Biological Studies

“Where my art and space end is sort of vague.”

Murphy, 1997
Pontus Hulten 1983 essay lays the groundwork for the case for Brancusi as the first furniture artist and the first Brancusi of the sculptures proper; he emphasizes the artist’s “passionate concern for the rapport of his sculptures with the space around them” and demonstrates how around 1915 “the distinction between the sculptures, the works commonly referred to as their bases, and the other objects in Brancusi’s studio became ever more blurred.”

(Pontus Hulten)

Todd Murphy’s Gesamtkunstwerk required not things to say so much as ways to say them, and the arc of his art takes us from declaration to account to poem.

More and more, the tone and texture of his imagery became characters themselves, even as Murphy’s purview maintained its epic proportions

It wasn’t so much that he was assuming the mantle of a bard; in fact, he was always nearing that galvanizing position but always steering clear of its full implications.

Rather, Murphy was looking for a lyric voice, the lyric voice that kept breaking through the surface until he found the chiaroscuro, visual and spiritual, that could fully liberate it.

Todd Murphy’s Gesamtkunstwerk required not things to say so much as ways to say them, and the arc of his art takes us from declaration to account to poem.

Had he been able to give us another 20-30 years of work, Murphy would have found his way to music, too. As it is, his every artwork is a breaking into song -- into the soul of a song, and into a song of the soul

“Where my art and space end is sort of vague.”

TODD MURPHY (1962-2020)