ГИМП / Pearl Murphy
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Peal Murphy’s Solo Exhibition at The Coningsby Gallery, London
| 24–27 November 2025 | 10 am–6 pm daily
Each piece channels the movement and power of the horse, merging memories of her own companion with the fierce energy of kok boru: a traditional Central Asian horseback game known for its speed and strength. Through this, she captures both the quiet spirit and the untamed force that define her practice.
London based artist Pearl Murphy works between tenderness and wildness, intimacy and vastness, memory and mythology. Her debut solo exhibition, ГИМП, presents a body of paintings and drawings inspired by the fierce equestrian traditions of Central Asia and her own formative years among the ponies of the New Forest.
Murphy’s practice moves fluidly between the wild and the intimate, tracing connections between the ancient horse cultures of Kyrgyzstan and the quiet memory of her childhood. Growing up between London and Hampshire, surrounded by musicians and artists, she developed an early reverence for animals and open landscapes. Horses became her lifelong companions: symbols of instinct, freedom, and the unspoken bond between human and nature.
In 2023, a riding journey through the mountains of Kyrgyzstan introduced Murphy to kok boru, the country’s national horse game: a raw, exhilarating contest of strength, skill, and unity between rider and horse. Captivated, she returned in 2025, immersing herself more deeply in the lives of the riders and their horses. Travelling across remote mountain regions by motorbike and horseback, she witnessed the games in their natural settings, encounters that continue to shape her exploration of movement, form, and energy.
For Murphy, this ongoing engagement with Kyrgyzstan is as much emotional as it is visual. The vastness of the steppe, the camaraderie between riders, and the elemental force of the horses themselves echo something ancient and instinctual within her, a return to a wilder way of seeing and feeling. In ГИМП, these experiences merge with her own memories of the New Forest, creating a body of work that feels both grounded and dreamlike, documentary and mythic.
Working in oil, pastel, chalk, and watercolour, Murphy merges expressive gesture with close anatomical observation to capture the tension between control and release, stillness and motion. Her approach is tactile and layered, often beginning with fluid drawings made from memory or field sketches before evolving into large-scale works that balance structure with spontaneity. The materials themselves become part of the dialogue: oil for its depth and sensuality, chalk for its fragility, and pastel for its immediacy and physicality.
Her compositions often hold a cinematic stillness, a reflection of her background in film and photography. There is a sense of suspended time, the moment between breath and movement, impact and reflection. The paintings are as much about the atmosphere and rhythm surrounding the horses as about their physical form. Early exposure to fashion and performance imagery has also left its trace on her visual language, infusing her work with a contemporary sense of staging and tension, as though each scene were lit by memory rather than daylight.
Through the rhythm of horses and riders, Murphy invites viewers into a space where geography, memory, and emotion converge, a visual journey through wild terrain, both external and internal. Her horses are not merely subjects, but conduits, embodiments of instinct, loss, and resilience. They move through the work like spirits, reminding us of the power of movement as a form of remembrance.
Pearl: “I hope when people see my work, they feel the excitement of the game, a love for horses, and a sense of awe, not just in the animals themselves, but in Kyrgyzstan and its culture”