James Austin Murray

You may not be able to eat in Gwyneth Paltrow’s dining room or hang on Oprah's Montecito patio, but with more A-list decorators branching into restaurant interior design, you can tap into the style of the stars. Many designers best known for the celebrity projects in their portfolios have recently expanded to projects at eateries around the world. It’s an opportunity to showcase to a wider audience their prowess in pattern mixing, furniture and art sourcing, and creating a mood where you want to linger long after the final course. Because restaurants, of course, are about more than just design. These spaces also serve as places to gather for cocktails or enjoy delicious food. Below, we gather some examples of spaces where you can indulge in style.

View images of our recent collaboration with Wecselman Design at the Ritz-Carlton Residences in Miami Beach.

This gorgeous model villa Z includes work by Donald Baechler, Dan Christensen, Gabriele Evertz, Max-Steven Grossman, Jane Manus, Donald Martiny, James Austin Murray, Udo Noger, Donald Sultan and Tigran Tsitoghdzyan.

We had the good fortune of connecting with James Austin Murray and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi James Austin, how do you think about risk?
Taking risks are essential if you want to grow and succeed. A number of years ago I was invited by Madison Gallery in California to do an artist residency there and have a subsequent solo exhibition. At the time I was just starting to get noticed and it was a dream scenario. So I bet the house. What I mean by that is I took my life savings, which was about $50,000 and I spent every dime of it on that show. I bought dozens of panels and an embarrassing amount of paint and supplies. I cleared out my accounts and went to work. By the time I arrived back home I was living on credit card debt and suddenly felt very poor. The solo exhibition was months away. I had done the work and now had a hard time continuing working because of funds. I believed in my work and felt confident, it was still a scary time.

View images of our recent collaboration with Wecselman Design at One Park Grove, Miami.

This stunning model unit includes work by Lluis Barba, Stanley Boxer, Lynn Chadwick, Dan Christensen, Max-Steven Grossman, Jane Manus, Donald Martiny, James Austin Murray, Udo Noger, Ernest Trova, Tigran Tsitoghdzyan and Bernar Venet.

Azure Development's $2,190,000 show house in Delray Beach hosts thirteen artworks from Sponder Gallery's roster of important artists.

Artists Include:

Stanley Boxer, Dan Christensen, Max-Steven Grossman, Kysa Johnson, Jane Manus, Donald Martiny, James Austin Murray, Udo Noger, Tigran Tsitoghdzyan and James Walsh

Black & White & In Between: Contemporary Art from the Frederick R. Weisman Art Foundation

Frederick R. Weisman Museum of Art, Pepperdine University, Malibu. Curated by Billie Milam Weisman

August 27, 2019 – December 8, 2019

This eclectic grouping of contemporary black and white drawings, digital media, photographs, prints,
paintings and sculptures are gathered together for this exhibition from the Frederick R. Weisman Art
Foundation. In color theory black and white are complete opposites. In scientific terms, where color is
determined through the visible spectrum of light, black is the absorption, or absence, of all visible light;
and white is the reflection, or presence, of it.

March 5 - May 14, 2019. Curated by James Little. New York Centric Catalogue. 

View works by Sponder Gallery artists including Stanley Boxer, Dan Christensen, Gabriele Evertz, James Austin Murray and Peter Reginato.

Foreword by KAREN WILKIN, New York, 2019

“Too much is expected of Art, that it mean all kinds of things and is the solution to questions no one can answer. Art is much simpler than that. Its pretentions more modest. Art is a sign, an insignia to celebrate the faculty for invention.” Stuart Davis wrote this in 1956, but it seems newly relevant today. Over the past three decades, art has been increasingly required to “mean all kinds of things” and to offer solutions to “questions no one can answer,” often at the expense of any other considerations. Today, in many prestigious art schools, students who wish to be taken seriously (and, sometimes, receive acceptable grades) are urged to make work that addresses such daunting issues as political unrest, climate change, civil rights, gender equality, animal welfare, poverty, and all the rest of it....

Vasari 21

James Austin Murray’s recent six- by six-foot paintings are made using the most basic of means: ivory black oil paint, a canvas and wood-panel support, and wallpaper brushes—up to nine affixed to a long handle. But the surface effects are far from simple, and indeed offer an almost otherworldly experience, as the striations from the brush take the eye on a roller-coaster journey into pleats and folds, over light-struck hillocks and into shadowy crooks and bends. Depending on where you stand, the paintings look like a forbidding landscape you could walk right into. It’s a visual encounter that is both unsettling and profoundly seductive.

Fortunately, Murray never took the advice of a well-meaning neighbor he regularly encountered as a teenager in New City, NY, who told him, at the time he was considering art school: “Just don’t get into any of that abstract stuff.” He had no intentions of becoming an artist at all until he took a lunch-hour class in high school and discovered he was the best draftsman in the group. Murray headed off to Parsons after graduation, where he studied illustration but was far more interested in pursuing his own vision. He landed jobs to pay the bills but says he knew he “didn’t want to be a hired gun working for some art director.”