Childhood Fears Photograph

Michael Gurhy’s work “is small-scale work but potent in terms of emotion. His work addresses youth culture but evokes a knowledge of the unforeseen, of premonition” - Francis Morris, Head of Collections International Art, Tate Modern & Enrique Juncosa, Director, Irish Museum of Modern Art. Gurhy’s work could be categorised between Freud's two fundamental drives of Eros (The life instinct, which include sexual instincts and the drive to live) and Thanatos (the drive of aggression, sadism, destruction, violence, and death) From a psychoanalytic viewpoint the work is confronting attachment and trauma, childhood fears, fear of abandonment and ultimately the fear of death while transience, beauty and loss read as a subtext. Blurring the lines between fantasy, reality and biography, the work takes on an ‘otherworldliness’ where anthropomorphic animals are messengers and the male body a psychological landscape exploring the corporal and the transcendental. His drawings are raw and reactionary exposing emotional fragility and moments of tenderness hidden beneath confident lines with a violent use of colour. In his sculptural work the visual language of religious iconography is disrupted and reimagined through the incorporation of fetishised objects, personal artefacts and fairytale imagery. Visually arresting and emotionally charged, his photographic and video based works reflect a background in painting and an affinity with the visuals of Christian Art and French Cinema, their strong sense of narrative link to the other mediums within the scope of his multidisciplinary practice.