ABSTRACT WORKS........It has been suggested that abstract painting has exhausted its ability to surprise, but not in Miha Murn’s case as he manages to produce a number of rhythmical, abstracted forms that offer plenty of surprises. He appreciates that representation only goes so far in attempting to understand the world in which we live, and he manages to engender an emotion and an immersive candour in this non-figurative work, which, on a theoretical level, bridges the great disjuncture that has often appeared difficult to connect, that between pure formalism and aesthetics. Murn is a prolific painter in a huge range of abstract styles, and these make up a large proportion of his oeuvre. He has a deep emotional attachment to his abstracts, and they are a dynamic expression of his artistic personality, and are also suggestive of a deeper connection with the spiritual and metaphysical world. As Benedetto Croce opined, ‘the work of art is the perfect analytico-synthetic process that takes place in the artist’s mind’, and through our own imaginative experience and objectified pleasure as viewers of his work, we have the opportunity of responding to this process by appreciating the creativity and meaning of Murn’s abstracts. We can then, in a sense, become re-creators of the artworks in our own minds, as opposed to simply being passive observers using art as entertainment. This is where we can ‘climb those cold white peaks of art’ in Clive Bell’s elegant phrase, through the potentiality of a transcendental experience.  

MIXED DRAWINGS.......Murn’s sense of experimentation is one of the most exhilarating aspects of his entire approach, and his desire to work in all possible mediums is laudable, but by any standards his mixed drawing series is not a successful one. I know Murn understands that he is not the finished or complete artist (is anyone at this young age?), and he certainly appreciates that he must focus and refine, control and develop his art. Here I take as my inspiration Heinrich Wölfflin, whose great merit was to look at art with some understanding of the problems of the creator, rather than by simply examining the picture itself. Wölfflin attempted to appreciate the psychological conditions that were at play in the artists’ mind by the specific configuration and form in any given painting. With Murn, we can discern his desire to fulfil what he considers to be his artistic destiny as he grasps at everything and anything that excites and engages him, regardless of the level of quality or aesthetic satisfaction he manages to engender from his ideas. This excitement in the possibilities of art is one of the most thrilling aspects of a young man who has achieved, quite frankly, an astonishing range of successes in all of his non-art arenas. But these achievements have (I am sure only temporarily), clouded his judgement. However, this will clear, and the new more focussed range of artworks that Murn will undoubtedly produce will herald an incredibly exciting period in his artistic development, and I have no doubt that an artist of distinction will emerge.

ART COLLAGES.......These modernist styles are the inspiration for Miha Murn’s own authentic collages, but, although conventionally composed, Murn’s have a twist; whereas most collages created by twentieth century masters, such as Picasso and Braque for instance, have clean lines and delineated edges without the need for further painting, Murn’s are covered in paint, which he splatters and daubs over an otherwise complete creation. This is to be expected from a man driven by the aforementioned sense of Kuntswollen, where he simply can’t help himself from being fully involved with the process of creation, as he seeks a more direct and personal connection with this genre. This is a laudable standpoint, and is indicative of his avant-garde approach with his confrontational attitude to aesthetics, where he, again, discards traditional notions and stylistic modes of production, which is symbolic of his self-assurance and belief in his own importance as a creator. He regards this medium as a ‘field of opportunity’ as he produces something out of nothing, notwithstanding that these collages do not necessarily signify anything other than the artist’s desire to create interesting forms.  

THE GREAT WALL COLLECTION......Centuries before the ideas of gender-bending sexuality were the zeitgeist, the Chinese were experimenting with modes of personal presentation. In Murn’s work, we note classic tropes from the Chinese opera in which both male and female characters’ faces are powder-coated white, with stark make-up for their accentuated rituals. Face painting is one of the most important aspects of the entire opera, as performers immerse themselves in their roles. Every colour has a semiotic role to play, as they denote an important character trait: red stands for bravery and fidelity, black for impatience, vulgarity, and rudeness, and white for cunning and treachery. Contemporaneously, many artists, and specifically photographers, have foregrounded these tropes in their work by focussing on their own modes of personal presentation, such as Andy Warhol, and activist photographer Nan Goldin. The latter is a perfect example, as she emphases the gender-bender sexuality of her subjects by centring the trans-sexual community, where all her subjects (take Goldin’s Paulette as an example) have assumed identities, markedly similar to those from Chinese Opera, which actually make them something of a cliché, but clichés work for the simple fact that there is some truth in them.

EARLY WORKS......From his earliest stage, Murn has been a gestural abstractionist, as opposed to a colour-field painter, (by which the artist seeks to control their palette to elicit a contemplative or emotional reaction in viewers). Murn’s gestural style can be noted in many works in which the hand of the artist is present and definable. Take Red Blood as an example, which is an early canvas oozing class and distinction, which has all the hallmarks of great abstraction; the energy that Murn manages to generate with his limited palette here is palpable. The fabulous colour contrasts exist in equilibrium to each other, exhibiting a creative tension and balance, with painting that is scuffed, dripped, hatched, and pasted, with seemingly hidden notations just out of reach. This is a hugely satisfying canvas on which Murn has exercised painterly control, as he seeks to tease out form from an unlikely allotropical ambiguity, in this case, densely applied impasto colours. We also note Blue Sea, where he exercises admirable restraint in successfully controlling his palette to two major colours with the addition of white. Here we can discern an evocation of the sea: the movement of the waves, and the indefinable energy of water in motion. These reductive canvasses are the most successful of the early works, and we can discern a depth in the marked surface of the pictures, suggestive of a style that has psychological reality in embodying Murn’s early state of mind and focus, which is allied to his formative draftsmanship.