Berlin – Francis Cook Gallery is pleased to announce A Dirty Arcadia, a solo exhibition by NYC based painter Liam Murphy-Torres, on view from 11 September to 15 September, 2025. In this ambitious new body of work, Murphy-Torres reimagines motifs pulled from contemporary urban life through the lens of modernist painting traditions.

Murphy-Torres captures familiar scenes—a playground in use, a quiet moment in a cafe, a commuter hurrying past—using them as starting points for pictures that ultimately become about the process of painting itself. Broad, expressive applications of paint dissolve subjects into pure sensation, and a tension is generated between recognizable form and freewheeling abstraction.

Lying at the heart of the show is the idea of Arcadia- the art historical, mythical, and literary trope of the idyllic landscape of leisure. For Murphy-Torres, this is not just a subject to be depicted but an attitude, a search for the ideal to be carried out pragmatically, wherever he might be. Central Park, the streets around his studio in the West Village, a backyard in Brooklyn, all become an occasion to search for paradise, for a moment of pleasure at the meeting of two colors, for a perfectly natural pose. Through the use of paint itself—bold color, unforced abstraction, and a masterful sense of composition—he redefines the modern pastoral not as an untouched idyll but as a space where nature, urbanity, and human interaction merge in a state of constant flux. Viewers are invited to reimagine the city not merely as a backdrop but as an active, living participant in the interplay of light, time, and memory.