Excerpt from show description: “Traumatica Dramatica” is the debut New York solo exhibition of artist Meg Lionel Muphy. Lionel Murphy’s paintings are directly influenced by her own personal experiences, as she copes with debilitating PTSD from severe domestic violence.
“Traumatica Dramatica” addresses violence against women from her own perspective as well as the historical precedent of emotional and physical violence against women throughout the canon of art history.
“The idea of violence haunts me, and I try to etch that subject into even the pinkest of paint,” she has stated of her visceral portraits.
Lionel Murphy depicts through her vivid brush strokes and intricate imagery a reverie through which the viewer can get lost with each poetic detail. Her paintings of the female form as giantess unconquerable figures address their experiences of pain, trauma, and healing as well as their interactions with the environments they consume as they assert their power. Her work depicts a reverence for fragility and humanity while examining questions about gender, sexuality, class, sacrifice, pain, sickness, loneliness, and most of all—violence and its haunting memories.
