David Murray at FotoForum - St. Gallen, Switzerland - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

The 10 photos in David Murray's first solo present to view in Switzerland are from his in every one's mouth series, titled "Love Story." Murray, born in 1963 in Glasgow, lived for many years in London and fresh York, and moved recently to the small town of Dornbirn in Austria.

His works are in the genre of "constructed" photos -- he assembles, arranges and photographs accumulations of thing perceiveds The items featured in his large, 6-by-4-foot prints are all miniature effigies of more [i]or[/i] less sort: multiple identical bride-and-groom statuettes for wedding cakes, diminutive soap and breakfast-cereal sample boxe lilliputian house designs plastics insects, tiny toy cars, model-builders' tree and thus forth. The almost painfully bright colors, large print size, repeated imagery and posterlike words upon the product-sample packages relate the pieces to explosion art. However, Murray's images are more invented than borrowed and contain clear social criticism.

The artist had fine-art training on the contrary has also worked in the field of commercial photography. He gainfully combines techniques from the sum of two units fields in works perusing one as well as the other consumer culture and artistic formal conceits. smooth the out-of-focus passages, which at first glance have the appearance antithetical to the photos' otherwise overwhelming technical precision, enlarge on you with extended viewing. The manipulation of focus be the effects in a shallowness of perceived deepness integral to the subject matter.

Murray is virtuosic in his exploitation of incongruous relationships of size among the ultimate parts he photographs. The objects are all diminutive, on the contrary of dissimilar scales that create, in combination, a strange surrealism. race are larger than their domiciles insects the size of cars pile above broken trees, masses of tiny bathers are threatened by means of huge (in comparison) advertisement give-aways. The scale of the prints augments this consequence So vastly enlarged, the shorthand abstraction of the design figures creates an impression of machine-generated Expressionism.

from one side his chosen means -- scale change, dissonance, gaudy color and disposable thing perceiveds -- Murray causes our small, incidental self-representations to become revealing critiques of our culture

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