Irene Montemurro works freely and without hesitation across a range of mediums to make up her vast visual language. Her collective practice is another wider diary of sorts, filled with images, costume, drawings, gouache on paper and poetry that enjoy the complementarity of unexpected juxtaposition.
Montemurro builds her surreal or imagined worlds from fragments; a close up of a creature, a detail from a fabric, a quote from a lyric from a poster from a band. These traces of narrative reference something both precise and unsettling, grotesque and glamorous, terrifying and tender. Costume and material for Montemurro is kindred with the works on paper in the exhibition which are textured with ideas surrounding bodily and fetish associations. Her inks feel like patent leather, paint behaves like icing, silk like the mouth-watering outfits of cartoon characters. Influenced by personal memory, manga, comic books and punk culture, the narrative is only implied in Montemurro’s work. They can be overloaded with detail and language and other times expressed very simply through a single cartoon or creature. In both cases Montemurro invites imagination, playing with the textures in and across the work to activate our senses and feed our curiosity.
Through her solo exhibition, we are invited to play in Montemurro’s sinister and seductive surrealism. Indulging in the theatrics of her work, the exhibition title ‘The Killing of Maura Sappilo’ refers to the gentle sacrifice of a character occasionally adopted by the artist. The event leaves us feeling both humorous and nostalgic, a reminder of the conflict so central to Montemurro’s work.
Irene Montemurro (Maura Sappilo) was born in southern Italy and is based in London. She received her BA in Illustration from the Camberwell College of Art (2017) and her postgraduate degree from the Royal Drawing School (2018), which hosted an online exhibition of her work as recipient of the Sir Denis Mahon Award (2020). Montemurro is closely involved with the London music scene, creating gig posters, cover artwork and stop motion animated music videos for a number of bands and venues. Additionally, Montemurro recently founded the noise punk band Moist Crevice.
