Antonio Murgia was born in Sarroch, in the province of Cagliari, Sardinia, in 1956, during a time when the region was primarily focused on sheep farming and agriculture. His family, like many others, was compelled to emigrate for work. Murgia grew up with a critical mindset and a predisposition towards innovative artistic forms, ultimately gravitating towards Pop Art.
– “Maestro” Antonio Murgia –
Through his art, Murgia depicts contemporary reality with a touch of irony, dismantling and removing negative elements and figures from current events. He achieves this by adopting innocent and familiar childhood heroes such as Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, and Goofy, as well as more confrontational characters like Spider-Man.
In the third millennium, Murgia introduced the concept of the ‘Ironical Murgia,’ which exposes a society governed by contradictions that only art can deconstruct. He moulds and shapes unreal narratives and personas, illustrating how reality can be manipulated and contoured to suit the preferences of those who control mass media.
While comic book heroes conceal their identities behind masks, Murgia boldly signs his full name. This Politically Incorrect stance empowers him to engage with the discussions of well-intentioned circles, fully aware that he can provoke and satirize the flawed ethics of the media narrative. Murgia’s chosen weapon is Pop Art, which he deploys to infiltrate the bastions of authority like water seeping through crevices, causing them to crumble in the process.
His art represents a continual deconstruction and reconstruction of reality, an exploration that delves beneath the surface and approaches the sublime. The tension between representational drawing and abstract painting yields captivating feminine visages, sensuous, alluring, and heroic forms imbued with vibrant hues, and anarchic textures that converse in the language of abstractionism, overshadowing the representational.
In the ‘Pretaporter’ series, Murgia revisits Plato’s notion that the genuine world doesn’t always appear as it truly is. He reverses the significant disparity between appearance and actuality, bewildering the viewer intentionally to guide them towards doubt, uncertainty, and inquiry. Murgia’s OROS PROJECT collection of Pop Art pieces mirrors the essence of reality pursued by the entropy of the universe. The collection’s title directs attention to the genesis of the term, commencing with “OR” for order and concluding with “OS” for chaos, a sort of alpha and omega.
The order inherent in the act of creation is determined by the eternal duality that clashes and merges between reason and instinct, femininity and masculinity, and opposing cerebral hemispheres – distinct yet unified by thought. Pablo Picasso once remarked that he spent his life acquiring the ability to paint like a child.
In a similar vein, Murgia honed his skills in drawing akin to a Renaissance master, but within those sketches, he acquired the ability to paint with the uninhibited style of a child, echoing Picasso’s approach.
Art is exigency, and Antonio Murgia’s necessity is to restore order, in the eyes of the observer, to the chaos of reality.
Discover even more @ www.antoniomurgia.it
Article edited by Prof. Luca Caricato
Luca Caricato – The World of Art
Leonardo Da Vinci Scholar
Art Historian – Art Expert