Babil, Timothy Murphy, 2025, mixed media, 72 x 44 in. / 182.88 x 111.76 cm.

Hubris and Myth in Contemporary Painting by Timothy Murphy

March 5, 2026 Gavin Coates

Timothy Murphy’s large-scale mixed media paintings Babil (2025), Icarus Augering In (2025), and Shock and Awe (GTFO) (2025) confront the destructive arc of ambition, ego, and collapse.

Timothy Murphy is a painter known for large-scale, layered works that merge myth, literature, and personal experience to examine ego, violence, trauma, and collapse.

Drawing from mythological, literary, and lived sources, including Dante, Milton, combat experience, and trauma, Murphy constructs dense, vertically oriented compositions built from hundreds of layers of poured and thrown paint. These works function as contemporary epics, where historical myth and personal reckoning collide through excess, scale, and visual overload.

Babil, Timothy Murphy, 2025, mixed media, 72 x 44 in. / 182.88 x 111.76 cm.

Babil addresses hubris through architectural metaphor, evoking the Tower of Babel as a structure built on ambition and destined for failure. The composition ascends vertically, stacking biomorphic forms and fleshy, stone-like masses into a precarious, spiraling tower. Red and pink elements pulse against muted grays and browns, suggesting both vitality and corruption. The painting’s layered surface mirrors the conceptual accumulation it critiques, each addition intensifying instability. Rather than depicting collapse outright, Babil captures the moment just before failure, when audacity peaks and consequence becomes inevitable.

Icarus Augering In, Timothy Murphy, 2025, mixed media, 72 x 44 in. / 182.88 x 111.76 cm.

In Icarus Augering In, Murphy reinterprets the myth of Icarus as a violent, downward force rather than a poetic fall. The central figure appears torn between radiant ascent and catastrophic descent, surrounded by eruptive paint flows and fragmented forms. Brilliant yellows and whites radiate outward, colliding with turbulent blues and flesh tones below. The layered pours create a sense of motion and impact, emphasizing risk as an active, accelerating condition. The work reframes Icarus not as a cautionary tale from the past, but as a recurring psychological pattern driven by ego and momentum.

Shock and Awe (GTFO), Timothy Murphy, 2025, mixed media, 90 x 45 in. / 228.6 x 114.3 cm.

Shock and Awe (GTFO) expands Murphy’s exploration of hubris into a contemporary and deeply personal register. Drawing from combat experience and the language of modern warfare, the painting fuses mythic scale with raw immediacy. Chaotic forms, eyes, architectural fragments, and symbolic debris cascade across the surface, creating a visual field saturated with confrontation and aftermath. The hundreds of layered pours generate both depth and suffocation, mirroring the overwhelming nature of violence and its psychological residue. The work reads as both indictment and exorcism, an epic rendered through excess rather than restraint.

These three paintings form a unified meditation on ego as a destabilizing force. Murphy’s work treats hubris not as abstract concept but as a lived condition, historical, mythological, and personal. Through monumental scale, extreme layering, and relentless visual density, he constructs contemporary epics where ambition fuels ascent and guarantees collapse. The central theme uniting the works is inevitability: when scale, power, and self-belief exceed human limits, the result is not transcendence, but impact.

Learn more About Naturalist Gallery of Contemporary Art.