Commonwealth Artists

21 October 2022

Kevin Murray's Retrospective Exhibition

Australian Catholic University, Rome

Le Ottobrate Romane

The Exhibition's Patrons are:
H.E. Chiara Porro, Australian Ambassador to the Holy See   and
Dr Barbara Jatta. Director of the Vatican Museums.
The Vatican Museums will produce the Catalogue of the Retrospective Exhibition in colaboration with the Australian Embassy to the Holy See.
 
Sydney-born painter  and resident of Rome for 62 years.

Kevin Murray, considers himself as a descendent of the SCUOLA ROMANA. The Scuola Romana began in the Studio of Mario Maffai and his Estonian wife, Raphael, in Via Cavour in 1924 and lasted up until the 1970s. It included such painters as Guttuso, Pirendello, Trombadore, Cagli, Donghi, Scipione, Macari, Gentilini and many more. These painters, despite their indivual personalities and styles, had two things in common that united them into the Roman School: they were all figurative artists rather than abstract and their Muse was the Eternal City of Rome herself with her warm ochre and russet coloured buildings and roof-tops, her Renaissance and Baroque church facades. towers and domes, her imposing Imperial monuments. her beautiful piazzas, fountains and River Tiber, her colourful fruit and vege markets, her ceramic platters and jugs, her blooming young men and women, her clergy, her workmen and housewives and pensioners. In sum, the whole life style of a people and the cityscape and countryside in which they lived and moved was the subject of the Scuola Romana Painters. It wasn't until Murray saw an important Retrospective of La Scuola Romana Painters that he fully realized that the subjects that enthused them also enthused him and that therefore he was their descendent without knowing it. ROMA, MUSA MIA!