JJ MURPHY GALLERY is pleased to present “Jumbo,” a solo exhibition of recent paintings and drawings by Mark Milroy. The show opens Wednesday, April 15, from 6 to 8 PM. It runs from April 16 to May 16, 2026. Gallery hours are Thursday–Saturday, 12–6 PM.

Mark Milroy paints the world around him, including portraits, still lifes, and personal narratives. Because portraits and still lifes were considered lesser genres and frowned upon by his teachers, he has tried to elevate both. His idiosyncratic still lifes consist of flowers, plants, skulls, snakes, people, and art books, which he employs both as compositional elements and as homages. “Horace” (2024), for instance, depicts a single sunflower and the cover of Anne Monahan’s “Horace Pippin, American Modern,” so that it also serves as a twice-removed portrait of the noted Black artist. “The Gardener in Profile” (2025) depicts a woman’s face in profile jutting in from the left side, flowers in a skull-like vase, and a green snake slithering in the foreground.

The portraits are based on observation, but Milroy transforms his subjects by adding poetic and imaginative details. Photography has continually demonstrated that the human face is complex and highly mutable. Milroy recognizes the challenge that portraiture entails. As he told an interviewer about the difficulties of trying to capture a person’s face, “Yet it’s still one of the most complicated things I can imagine doing—trying to paint someone—not just my preconceived idea of them, but who they truly are.”

Milroy’s portraits and still lifes are unique and highly unorthodox. They flatten space in an extreme manner that recalls the work of self-taught or outsider artists. In a review in Hyperallergic, John Yau observes, “In creating space without relying on perspective, Milroy hints at the influence of 15th-century Florentine portraits and [Cedric] Morris, as well as Philip Guston after his move away from abstraction, and Marsden Hartley, especially his still lifes. While I see these connections, I feel that Milroy has established his own territory.”

Milroy also creates larger narrative works that draw on his childhood memories, such as a family dinner or a cramped family car ride in a Volkswagen. “Jumbo” (2025) features an elephant, red train cars, the corners of a school building, and adults piled on top of a young teen. For Milroy, it’s highly personal. Jumbo, the famous Barnum and Bailey circus elephant, was killed when he was struck by a train in 1885, in the very same town where Milroy grew up. Milroy connects this historical event to a traumatic experience that happened to him in his first year of high school, in which he was tackled by teachers while attempting to flee the building. “North Star” (2026) recalls an incident from grammar school involving peers forcing him to spin on a merry-go-round.

Mark Milroy was born in St. Paul, Minnesota, and grew up in St. Thomas, Ontario. He has exhibited in galleries in New York City, Brooklyn, Chicago, LA, Sag Harbor, and Canada. He had a recent solo exhibition at Pamela Salisbury, Hudson, NY, in 2025 and was included in group exhibitions at Stowaway, Los Angeles, and Karma in Maine. This show is his first solo exhibition in NYC. Milroy’s work has been featured in Art Summit, Hyperallergic, Architectural Digest Spain, Vogue Living, and The Paris Review Daily. He received his BFA degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from The New York Studio School. The artist lives and works in Brooklyn, NY.