BIO

Michael Gurhy (b. Cork, Ireland) is a London-based artist working primarily in painting, sculpture, and installation. His practice explores the tension between vulnerability and power, often using the body as a site of transformation and psychological depth.

Gurhy recently completed a Master of Research (MRes) in Fine Art at the Royal College of Art, London. His work has been exhibited at Crawford Municipal Gallery (Cork), The Nunnery Gallery (Bow Arts), and The Triskel Arts Centre (Cobh), with recent work shown at The Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge).

He has been awarded the Crawford Open Artist Award and the Soho Fellowship Programme, with work acquired for the Soho House Permanent Collection. His work is also part of the University College Cork Collection, having received the U.C.C. Purchase Prize. Additionally, he has been the recipient of Arts Council England Grants, including a Project Grant (2020) and Developing Your Creative Practice (2021).

His work continues to evolve, drawing influence from psychoanalysis, mythology, and personal narratives, with figures emerging as fragmented, spectral, or shifting between states.

ARTIST STATEMENT

Michael Gurhy’s work explores the fragile tensions between the psyche, the body, and transformation. Through drawing, painting, sculpture, and video, he investigates the liminal spaces between presence and absence, human and animal, desire and loss. His practice is deeply influenced by psychoanalysis, mythology, and personal narratives, with figures emerging as fragmented, spectral, or shifting between states.

Materiality plays a crucial role in his work, with an emphasis on surfaces that evoke both vulnerability and permanence. His porcelain sculptures hold a physical fragility that contrasts with their frozen, almost fossilized forms, while his paintings use layering and erasure to create a sense of psychological depth. The use of fluid, organic mark-making alongside controlled, precise gestures mirrors the duality between instinct and restraint, interior and exterior worlds.

Recurring themes in Gurhy’s work include transformation, hysteria, the unconscious, and the instability of identity. There is often a negotiation between attraction and repulsion, where bodies dissolve, mutate, or remain unresolved. Beauty and violence coexist in his practice, entwined in a delicate tension that reflects the fragility and intensity of human experience. His compositions suggest narratives without closure, inviting the viewer into a state of suspension—caught between the familiar and the uncanny.

Frances Morris (former Director, Tate Modern) and Enrique Juncosa (former Director, Irish Museum of Modern Art) described Gurhy’s work as “small-scale but emotionally potent,” noting that it “captures youth culture while evoking a sense of the unforeseen, of premonition.” Selected for the Crawford Open Artist Award, his work responded to the exhibition’s theme The Sleep of Reason, highlighting its psychological depth and underlying tensions.

His work carries an emotional charge, oscillating between the autobiographical and the universal. It reflects on what it means to inhabit a body, to remember, and to long for something just out of reach.