BIO

Michael Gurhy (b. Cork, Ireland) is a London-based artist working across painting, sculpture, and digital processes. His practice explores transformation, desire, and the instability of identity through fragmented figures, mythological symbolism, and emotionally charged materiality. Drawing on influences from psychoanalysis, Catholic iconography, and queer theory, Gurhy’s work sits at the intersection of beauty and brutality, sacred and erotic.

He holds a Master of Research in Fine Art from the Royal College of Art (2024), an MA in Fine Art from Central Saint Martins (2009), and a BA from Crawford College of Art and Design (2005). His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Fitzwilliam Museum (Cambridge), the Nunnery Gallery (London), Crawford Art Gallery (Cork), and MoMus (Thessaloniki).

Gurhy has received numerous awards, including the Soho House Fellowship (with work acquired for their permanent collection), the Crawford Open Artist Award, the UCC Purchase Prize, and grants from Arts Council England. He currently lives and works in London.

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.