The leaping dog at the center of Aileen Murphy’s mentality-yatter, 2021—like many of this Berlin-based Irish painter’s subjects—is an exuberantly confusing presence. Murphy’s outsize pooch busily commands the more than six-foot-high canvas, while barely registering as a coherent form. Scruffy, smeary strokes of sharp white, salmon pink, honey yellow, and midnight blue congregate loosely as a canine figure, a dog body without fixed physical contours: Scribbled black eyes peer out from an aggregation of energetic gestural marks. More unstable still is the peculiar hurly-burly of the animal’s