Ethan Murrow, “The Parliament”
- Democracy Chain
- Sep 22
- 4 min read
by Matthew Kangas
Winston Wächter Fine Art, Seattle, Washington
Continuing through October 18, 2025
It makes perfect sense that Ethan Murrow has had almost as many exhibitions of his work in Paris as in New York — or Seattle. His seventh show here is composed of 11 large acrylic paintings and six large graphite drawings. Despite the valiant efforts of numerous critics to place Murrow within the context of contemporary American art, few have identified his debt to postwar French Surrealist art. Yet this is the hidden key to understanding his bizarre imagery of implausible landscapes with humans, animals and birds.
Rather than older war-era avatars of American surrealism such as Peter Blume, Dorothea Tanning or Pavel Tchelichew, we should look to more recent and less well-known French artists such as Roland Cat (1943-2016) who provide startlingly precise parallels to Murrow’s consistently surreal imagery. Humans possessing animal heads, spacious landscapes, vast bodies of water, and what one French critic described as Cat’s tendency to be “less Surreal than Fantastic.” Murrow is an American Fantastic artist.
All of the paintings here consist of mixtures of human and animal relationships, snowy peaks in the distance, and nearby bodies
of waters, some with icy crags. Visual puns are set within other puns in some cases, as in the large drawing (56 by 50 inches) “Analogy at Rest.” This ambitious work depicts a Flemish tapestry draped over the back of a long-horn steer and a hunter in a toga with his dog in the background. The painting is a picture of a hunting scene within a hunting scene. Like Roland Cat, the meaning is enigmatic, resistant to easy unraveling, better left to our curiosity. Each picture hovers in a territory of fantastic imagination and meticulous technical construction. Such detail of brushwork and execution reinforce the Surrealist roots of the Massachusetts-born painter, anchoring him in an impressive legacy of other enduring School of Paris surrealists, paramount among whom stands Max Ernst. His animal headdresses and floral bouquets atop human bodies are all borrowed by Murrow.
Much of the enjoyment — and perplexity — of Murrow’s art lies in its ambiguity and stupefying defiance of realistic logic. Similarly, the artist’s popularity in Belgium point toward another kindred maître, René Magritte. Like the Belgian, Murrow has incorporated ordinary settings with quietly alarming figures trapped in unlikely worlds. “Housekeeper,” “Chauffeur,” and “Bell Ringer” set bucket-heads in domestic architectural environments with attendant dogs and in the latter, a complacent sheep perched atop a pile of books. Beautifully painted skies, placid lakes, and ominous mountain peaks provide the backgrounds. With each painting crammed with symbols of musical instruments, floral bouquets, or books, another art-historical precedent comes to mind: 17th-century Dutch allegorical or “vanitas” paintings. Seen this way, even Vermeer is a distant cousin right up to their shared mysterious, indecipherable meaning.
Still set in the present, however, each male figure is attired in casual clothing with colored basketball shoes. Rooted in a past of irretrievable meaning with their distant 19th-century-like landscapes and art-historical clues, Murrow’s paintings speak to the present.
Several canvases have a leaping figure inspired by Yves Klein caught mid-air. For example, in “Interpose,” he jumps across a lotus pond before a Chinese-like mountain landscape. A giant paper tiger’s head obscures the jumper’s vision. Is this a pun on modern-day China as a “paper tiger”? The jumper runs in the other direction while reading an open book in “The Gifter.” His head is replaced with a long trailing bouquet.
In “The Parliament of Fowls,” another reader is standing in a black suit surrounded by black crows. The reader’s head is a big bird with open eyes, the whole recalling Alfred Hitchcock’s film, “The Birds” (1963), another allegory about ecological catastrophe. The title, drawn from Geoffrey Chaucer’s 1381 poem about courtly love, suggests a human-bird dialogue, but one fated to incomprehension, as in so many of Murrow’s juxtapositions of animals and humans. This kind of repeated motif, with its broad hints of inter-species conflict, comprises the only tension in Murrow’s otherwise tranquil compositions.
Matthew Kangas writes regularly for Visual Art Source eNewsletter; Ceramics: Art & Perception (Australia); and Preview (Canada). Besides reviewing for many years at Art in America, American Craft, Art Ltd., Vanguard and Seattle Times, he is the author of numerous catalogs and monographs, the latest being the award-winning Italo Scanga 1932-2001. Four anthologies of his critical essays, reviews and interviews were issued by Midmarch Arts Press (New York) and available on Amazon at Books by Matthew Kangas.
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