Fionna Murray @ Eagle Gallery

Antonioni’s Blow Up was one of the iconic films of 1960s London. It has as its central motif, an ordinary city park, in which a young fashion photographer comes to believe he has photographed a possible murder. In his studio he exposes the details of the crime through a series of blow-ups. With each enlargement the original image becomes a mysterious constellation of abstract marks, from which he struggles to find clarity and meaning.
Fionna Murray responded to the film’s sense of familiarity and otherness by using a series of stills as the basis for her paintings Blow Up and other Stories. “On seeing the film again after many years, the scene in the park uncovered a dislocation between London (which is now partly in my imagination) and the west of Ireland where I live today. The artificial landscape of the park embodied my own recollections of London, but also unexpectedly, a notion of rural Ireland. As a kind of ‘metropolitan pastoral’, the images of the park become a starting point for personal ambiguities concerning, migration, loss, and notions of home.”