MEG LIONEL MURPHY
Picasso famously said that women are either doormats or goddesses. My work plots the path from the doormat to the goddess.
I paint a faraway land called Manica Deprica, where violence transforms femme bodies into a monstrous size so that their pain must be seen, felt, and reckoned with.
Unable to fit within the walls that once contained them, the giants leave home—moving through small towns, across storefronts, factories, churches, fields, and highways—searching for safety while trying to outpace an army of angry soldiers at their feet.
In Manica Deprica, the wounded body is not a source of shame. It is the beginning of a new religion built upon something very old. This approach informs my latest body of work within the show Deliver Me at the Law Warschaw Gallery, this Fall of 2026, where I draw from early medieval Celtic Loricas—protective prayers or charms that name every part of the body in careful succession. The prayer does not deny danger. Instead, it unabashedly declares vulnerability and demands attention no matter how unpopular and uncomfortable the wound may be. In experiencing domestic violence, we are often waiting for a bruise to become a ticket into belief. Like medieval wounds, the marks in my paintings are symbols of interior injuries that linger in the body, mood, and imagination long after visible evidence disappears.
Painting returns me to my body. I paint a hand, and I have a hand. I paint a leg, and I have a leg. I paint an eye, and I have an eye. The paintings become prayers, spells, and talismans for survival.
Deliver Me
LAW WARSCHAW GALLERY | St Paul, MN | Fall 2026
Recent Exhibitions
TALK BACK: CHARLES ALLIS MUSEUM
ECSTASY & ESCAPE: MUSEUM OF WISCONSIN ART
About
Meg Lionel Murphy paints a dreamworld where suffering transforms women into monumental forms.
Following a PTSD diagnosis from domestic violence, she left a publishing career and turned to painting as a mode of healing and bodily reclamation. Murphy is currently an MFA candidate at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, where she teaches drawing. She holds a BA from the University of Minnesota–Twin Cities, where she triple-majored in Art, Art History, and English Literature. Recent solo exhibitions include Law Warschaw Gallery (St. Paul), Museum of Wisconsin Art DTN (Milwaukee), The Untitled Space (New York), and CoExhibitions (Minneapolis). Her work is held in the Minnesota Museum of American Art and has been featured in Hyperallergic, Bitch, Artnet News, Forbes, and New American Painting.