All twelve paintings Ciaran Murphy showed in his recent solo at Kavi Gupta allude to nature. This was an exhibition of leering monkeys, blasted tree trunks, moonlit hills, hunting hyenas, palm trees, and wafting clouds, through which the artist, in his hesitant and proximate brushwork, offered a wary but wistful disengagement from the natural world. Nature appears to be something that Murphy largely experiences secondhand—there are not a lot of monkeys, hyenas, or palm trees in Dublin, where he lives—and his work seems to acknowledge an inchoate relationship to it, a kind of fissure that can

At the bottom of the checklist for Molly Zuckerman-Hartung’s exhibition at Julius Caesar was a Shakespeare (mis)quote: “Macbeth: If we should fail? Lady Macbeth: We fail. But screw your courage to the sticking point and we shall not fail.” This might be a motto or abridged artist statement for Zuckerman-Hartung, who has gathered up her courage and screwed it to the continued project of rethinking abstraction.

The artist seems to imagine abstraction as Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari do, as an infinite field of potentials; contrary to any conception of abstraction as an endgame of absences and