Craig Murray-Orr was born in 1942, in Lower Hutt on the southern edge of New Zealand’s North Island. He studied at the Ilam School of Art in the 1960s and since 1968 has lived in North London. Two thirds of his life then has belonged to the edge of Hampstead Heath rather than to the 'land of the long white cloud', but it is early memories of a genuinely rough country that have guided his forty year career.
This exhibition, his first for nearly ten years, will include a group of twenty small landscape paintings shown alongside large-scale sculptural works, the most recent of which is a wall-mounted sculpture based on seven sheaves of grass bending in the wind. Nine years in the making, this newly-completed piece is typical of Murray-Orr's pared down aesthetic - spare, sharp, elegant and magnificent.
