ARTIST STATEMENT

Michael Gurhy is a London-based Irish artist whose work explores the fractured nature of identity through myth, memory, and the queer body. Drawing on psychoanalysis, art history, and the symbolic resonance of materials, his practice moves across painting, sculpture, photography, and installation to examine desire, shame, and psychological transformation.

Working instinctively with layered narratives, Gurhy disrupts archetypal myths and psychoanalytic tropes, queering the visual language of classical and religious iconography. His materially diverse practice includes porcelain, jacquard weaving, 3D-printed sculpture, and symbolic found objects—each chosen for its sensual weight and emotional charge. These works conjure emotional landscapes that hover between the intimate and the surreal—where fairy tale meets the feral, and the theatre of becoming and undoing unfolds.

Often centering the male form, Gurhy stages masculinity as something performed, vulnerable, and fragmentary. In these works, what begins as costume slips into confession. His images and objects reflect a kind of queer archaeology—haunted by the animal, the spectral, and the unsaid. They conjure states of mourning, eroticism, and psychic undoing—evoking the silent spaces that follow rupture.

Whether reimagining Leda and the Swan through a homoerotic gaze, or sculpting porcelain limbs that echo mythic dismemberment, Gurhy’s installations evoke a psychological terrain where violence and beauty coexist. Across each medium, the body is not whole but felt—rendered sacred and broken, like a relic, a lover, or a ghost.