Liam Murphy-Torres

American painter Liam Murphy-Torres (b. 2000) arrives at scenes of daily life by way of painterly abstraction. Working from a combination of direct observation, memory, and the art of the past, his work reads both as a visual diary of lived experience and as pure painting in the modernist tradition. He incorporates motifs drawn from public and private urban life, but the ultimate meaning of his paintings remains in their formal language. City streets, parks, and domestic spaces become transformed into color and shape – creating pictorial space rather than aiming for mimetic reproduction. His project is inherited from Cézanne, Matisse, and the Bay Area Figurative Painters, but reimagined in light of his own experiences. 

Born in Boston, Murphy-Torres is currently an MFA student at the New York Studio School. He is the recipient of an Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation grant and his work has been exhibited in New York, London, and Philadelphia.

He earned his BFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he was honored with the Packard Drawing Prize, the Irma H. Cook Prize, the August Cook Prize, and the Daniel Garber Prize for Excellence in Drawing. He holds a Barnes-DeMazia Certificate in art history and aesthetics, and has studied at the Art Students League of New York and the Mount Gretna School of Art.

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