Murray Walker

Opening introduction with Emeritus Professor Sasha Grishin AM, FAHA

Fox Galleries celebrates Spanning Time, a survey exhibition of the unabashed Murray Walker. Murray is a major contributor to Australian art history with extensive international recognition. With a career spanning over six decades, Spanning Time presents the art artifacts of a time traveller; bronze assemblages, compiled totems and bold expressionist oil paintings across Fox Galleries Boardroom and Gallery. To notice the complexity in Walker’s work is to be brave, to relish in the raw and refined aesthetics that make this rare exhibition a must on the calendar.

It is not easy to distill the career highlights of Murray Walker. Since his first exhibition in Melbourne in 1975, Walker’s works have been acquired in private, regional, and state collections as well as educational institutions across Australia including The National Gallery of Australia, Canberra which currently holds over 300 works in their collection. Walker has been commissioned by the Victorian Tapestry workshop on multiple occasions and is internationally held in collections in Norway, Germany, London, France & USA; notably at the Munch Museum, Oslo, Norway, Germany British Museum, London, UK, Picasso Museum Archives, Paris, France Smithsonian Institute, Washington DC, USA.

Murray Walker is an Australian based artist, cultural anthropologist and writer with a voracious zest for International travel that has led to an extensive exhibiting history and worldwide recognition leaving a strong impact on Australian art. Walker studied Fine Art Melbourne at RMIT and continued his studies at International institutions, in Italy and the competitive Slade School of Fine Art in London.

While a scholar, Walker would be described as an Outsider artist, influenced by Post Expressionists, Dadaists and those who are not afraid to delve into the complexities of the unconscious. Murray describes himself as a “time traveller,” taking you on a cultural pilgrimage from historical literature, archetypal knowledge, to the museum; wading through rituals and revaluations to the streets of graffiti, posters and human interactions to form unique ‘art artifacts.’ A personal history, imbued with complex meaning and mystery that is raw and all familiar. Presented in its refined and condensed aesthetic state, it narrates innocence; diverging materiality across oil painting, lithograph, sculptural assemblage and collage.