Brett Murray: A stone thrower grows up

He sits on the edge of his plinth, the curvature of his spine indicating his age and his perspective on life. His face, with an economy of line, is ruminating, cogitating, meditating. There’s a lifetime of history here. But also regrets and pleasures, successes and mistakes, which you can read in the benign smile, the button eyes and kooky half-moon ears and how they are all placed on the simple concave face. This is Father (Monkey), one of the works on show in Brett Murray’s current exhibition, Brood, at Everard Read / Circa in Rosebank.

There’s something gorgeously heady in being present at an exhibition of work by a mature artist who knows who he is, what he wants and is not afraid to say so. Murray has never been one to kow-tow to others’ ideas or moral attitudes and Brood is a true tour-de-force show, celebrating his sublime engagement with the royalty of sculpture mediums — cast bronze and marble — as well as his sense of the “what if?” with gold, two dimensions, Perspex and wood.

The works are unhesitating in their clean lines. Sanctuary, a piece in white Carara marble, is arguably the exhibition’s key-note work, given its layout. It represents a parent and child elephant in embrace, their trunks pointing heavenwards. It is flawless; the veins of the marble render it visually cloud-like. And soft on the eye like the folds in Michelangelo’s Pieta. You want to touch it. To imbibe it. To weep.

Brood, a show comprising almost 30 new works, is not the baldly confrontational material that got Murray headline attention through his controversial painting depicting former president Jacob Zuma, The Spear in 2012; rather it’s much deeper and stronger on many levels. It’s also kinder and more introspective. It’s about family and tribe. But it’s also about Murray’s unequivocal mastery of decisive forms and an ability to convey that ineffable sense of empathy in characters and creatures that you may consider twee choices, on paper.

In living detail however, these choices sit both easy on the sensibilities and heavily on your sense of self. It has to do as much with their satisfying roundness of form as it does with their poses, which speak to you, as a human being in the world.

Flawless lines

According to Murray’s blurb, posted on the culmination of this exhibition, at the top of the spiral incline, the body of work is the fruit of the emotional detritus that came of Covid-19 isolation. It’s about engagement with his family’s characteristics and a gentle playfulness that teases out personality traits of his partner and children. It’s about his focus on process and his acknowledgment of himself as a “stone-thrower at heart”.

But look closely at the flawless firm lines that define Murray’s elephants, monkeys, little birds and rabbits. A notch or seventeen away from unadulterated cuteness, and with a wise nod to the economy of aesthetic lines in the sculptural work of precolonial Africa or that of modernist sculptor, Constantin Brancusi, Murray’s work is bold and unabashed in its robust forms, its playfulness and how body can connect to body.

And yet, it’s also about elephant eyes that bulge out from the sides of their smooth heads and the anthropomorphism of simply drawn faces of monkeys. It’s about how rabbits’ ears can droop with clumsy sweetness onto their torsos. And you might think this exhibition is, like the work of Swedish-born artist Claes Oldenburg, a tactile experiment in making things that should feel a certain way, out of material, that feels completely different.

You wouldn’t be completely wrong. It shocks your understanding of how you relate to the smooth lines, cuddly likenesses and the cold hard material, in which they have been rendered. But it does something much deeper, as well. Murray’s works are not one-liners or jokes out to trick you or tickle your fancy. Each has a dignity which is mesmerising. It triggers your sense of empathy, not on the superficial anthropomorphic lines of animals dressed in clothes, but deeply. These are sentient beings, like you. And you can’t stop looking at them because of this.

Murray’s repertoire is enriched by a body of two-dimensional works on Perspex and wood that see the strong and sometimes doubled lines that a thick Dremel has cut into the support. They’re lines emphasised with gold, and the effect is both sophisticated and playful. The lines look simplistic, but as with Murray’s three-dimensional works, there’s nothing simple here in this understanding of form and background, of shape and how it can convey emotion.

Brood is a culmination of all of Murray’s ideas and approaches that he has worked with in his prolific career so far. There’s the wry political jibes, the clean lines, the social commentary and the immense sense of polish and time invested in works that on a level are like children’s toys. Only, they’re grown-up. As is Murray. They’re simple but do not let you briefly glance at them and move on. You want to hold them close and never let them go.

Brood is on at Everard Read / Circa gallery until March 30.