de boer (Los Angeles) is pleased to present Advertisements and Other Pictures, a solo exhibition by London-based Murray Clarke, his first with the gallery. The exhibition brings together eight oil on canvas paintings that, on surface level, appear to emulate the look, thinking, and lifestyle of prep schools and high society. A complex and self-reflexive act, the paintings interrogate the systems that produce aesthetics, capital, and identity and the ways in which taste, beauty, and class are constructed, circulated, and consumed. 

The gestural simplicity of his portraits, taken as a whole, makes up quite a complex of civil manners. In works such as Evening Red (2024), and Beach (2024), the textures of wool, cotton, and synthetic blends are immediate expressions of hierarchy and a repetitive system of visibility about whose bodies and desires are made visible, commodified, and erased. This reorients the exhibition as a whole to visual persuasion while addressing fantasies of selfhood.

In this way, Clarke’s paintings echo and embrace the circulatory logic of the market itself: images made to move endlessly, stripped of origin yet loaded with beautiful history. Made in a medium that defies the digital, and rooted in painstaking observation and slow accumulation, stands as a paradox for the speed and disposability of visual culture. The result is a playful intermingling revealing how the visual economies of the twentieth century still reverberate into the uncertain futures of the twenty-first.