Margaret Murphy is a Los Angeles-based photographer whose work explores themes of femininity, the complexity of the gaze on women, the commodification of identity, and the influence of social media on photography. The exhibition I Could Look at You All Day is her first solo exhibition in Germany. In the photographic series of the same title, she addresses self-perception and self-observation as a woman by pointing the camera at her own body. The work is shown alongside her recent series Fat Feminine, in which she creates AI-generated images that open up new perspectives on fatness in relation to femininity. Murphy describes her practice as a visual play of contrasts: serious and humorous, substantial and superficial, subjective and political, emotive and detached.

The 2021 series I Could Look at You All Day contains self-portraits and still lives taken by Margaret Murphy inside her own home. With this work, she responds to the influential role of social media images on women's self-perception. She draws inspiration from art history, meme and pop culture, and internet aesthetics. She often photographs with a mobile phone and uses studio lighting and digital effects that reflect visual trends on the Internet. Murphy's series addresses the observer observing herself. John Berger, in his essay on women in his book Ways of Seeing, writes that every woman “has been taught from childhood to constantly survey herself.” Being both “the surveyor” and “the surveyed” is necessary to her identity as a woman, he argues, because what is normally considered as her success in life depends on how she is viewed by men. Murphy brings to the foreground this concept of the internalized male gaze with her photographic stagings. We see Margaret Murphy in these images partly vulnerable, partly self-assured - but always remaining conscious of herself on a meta-level. One could almost think that it is the images that are observing themselves here - not to please, but to assert themselves.

Murphy is not interested in established and sophisticated practices of artistic image making. Just as she often uses her phone as a camera and Instagram filters for digital manipulation, she has recently been creating images with AI programs. Unlike many photo-based artists who reject artificial intelligence, Murphy views this software as a conceptual and technical tool that accelerates and simplifies image production. In Fat Feminine, she uses text-to-image prompts with the AI program Midjourney and evaluates how this consumer-level software interprets and represents the fat female form. The text prompts include terms for fatness combined with keywords related to surroundings, style, color, texture, and art history. The results possess an aesthetic that could fit somewhere between the muses of Sandro Botticelli and the photographs of David LaChapelle. Although the images seem flawed and absurd because of the still young and fledgling technology, some of these female figures exude a strong sense of self-determination, while others radiate a humorous, anarchic energy.

Margaret Murphy (b. 1990, Washington, D.C.) received her BFA in Photography from Purchase College School of Art+Design in 2013 and her MFA in Photography from the University of Hartford in 2021. Murphy has exhibited in several shows across the U.S., including the Academy of Art Museum, Easton, MD; These Days Gallery, Los Angeles, CA; Multiple Exposures Gallery, Alexandria, VA; Texas Photographic Center, Houston, TX; Center Gallery, Wichita, KS; Paradice Palase, Brooklyn, NY; Latela Gallery, Washington, D.C.; and in numerous online group exhibitions. In 2023, Murphy's artwork was included in group exhibitions with EXPANDED.ART, a gallery and online art platform based in Berlin, Germany. She currently lives in Los Angeles, CA.

The exhibition and artist talk are kindly supported by the Bezirksamt Lichtenberg von Berlin with funds from the Bezirkliche Kulturförderung.