Voices in the Dark

Press Release

JJ MURPHY GALLERY is pleased to present Nora Sturges's solo exhibition of recent paintings, “Voices in the Dark,” opening Wednesday, November 13, 2024, from 6–8 PM. The show runs from November 14 through December 21. Gallery hours: Thursday–Saturday, 12–6 PM. This is the artist’s first solo show in New York City and coincides with the major exhibition “Siena: The Rise of Painting, 1300–1350” at The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In her small-scale, delicate gouache paintings on panel—4.5 x 6, 6 x 6, and 6 x 8 inches—Nora Sturges mines late medieval Italian frescoes to explore the more mysterious and engaging aspects of them. The visionary artist Bob Thompson (1937–1966) borrowed heavily from the Old Masters—from Piero della Francesca to Poussin and Goya—to give structure to his paintings. Sturges is inspired by various elements of the medieval works, especially the small details and their spatial complexity. She does not so much translate the frescoes as reimagine them within the context of the present moment. As Sturges observes, “I see worlds coming together—the holy and the earthly, the medieval and the present day, the abstract and the descriptive.”

Sturges's “The Lady Vanishes (after Giovanni da Modena),” 2024, is based on da Modena’s “Departure of the Magi” (circa 1420), in which she transforms and abstracts the original fresco. The myriad figures filling the three boats have disappeared entirely. What remains are various shapes: abstracted forms of the boats, a large sail, several birds in the foreground, and, most prominently, the wooden plank extending from the shore to the ship. In “After Midnight” (2024), on the other hand, Sturges embellishes Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s figure of Justice from “The Allegory of Good Government” (1338–1339) to the point where the source of her painting becomes barely recognizable.

While the abstract shapes can sometimes be deciphered if one happens to know the original fresco, Sturges’s paintings move beyond their source to create fantastical, magical, hallucinatory, and even surreal scenes that suggest colorful underwater kingdoms and otherworldly vistas that one might associate with science fiction. In her catalog essay “The Recombinant Space of Painting,” Kristen Hileman writes: “Nora Sturges undertakes teeming miniaturizations of space to create recombinant and marvelous worlds, where gravity is torqued, the sky overflows, and monsters mingle with angelic creatures in mysterious pageants of lush color and exquisite pattern.”

Nora Sturges has had solo exhibitions, most recently in the fall of 2023, at C. Grimaldis Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland. Her work has appeared in numerous group exhibitions, including Galerie im Körnerpark, Berlin, Germany, and Asya Geisberg Gallery, New York City. Sturges received a BA from Bowdoin College, Maine, and an MFA in painting from Ohio University, Athens, Ohio. She currently teaches painting and drawing at Towson University in Maryland. The artist lives and works in Baltimore.