Ethan Murrow

A man caught in and behind wallpaper, a chimpanzee in a lifeboat, mountain climbers and hikers in the middle of a polar sea à la Caspar David Friedrich: Ethan Murrow (*1975 in Greenfield, Massachusetts) plays with the dimensions we are familiar with and tells a scarcely conceivable story with each of his pictures. Their references lie in personal experiences, historical sources, or in the romanticizing landscapes of the Hudson River School, from which his fantasy springs. At first glance one believes to be looking at edited black-and-white photographs, until it quickly becomes apparent that these are meticulously prepared pencil drawings. Murrow examines the boundary between the artist’s fiction and depicted reality. Yet this volume deals not just with his pencil drawings—for the first time, one can also marvel at the extensive works he magically conjures on walls with a ballpoint pen.