Curated By: Delphian Gallery

Seating Arrangement - Florence Hutchings' debut solo show

"Curated By:" is an ongoing series by WWW Contemporary, where we invite inspiring figures from the contemporary art world to share their stories, reflect on their practice, and curate a personal selection of favourite artworks from our online gallery.

We are delighted to welcome Delphian Gallery as our latest Guest Curator.

Founded in London in 2017 by Benjamin Murphy and Nick JS Thompson, Delphian Gallery is an artist-run, nomadic gallery dedicated to championing emerging contemporary artists. Alongside their exhibitions, they are also the authors of The Artist’s Roadmap—a practical and honest guide to building a sustainable career in today’s contemporary art world.

As part of this feature, we also sat down with co-founder Benjamin Murphy to discuss Delphian Gallery, the evolving contemporary art landscape, and the ideas behind their curatorial practice.

Nick JS Thompson and Benjamin Murphy

WWW Contemporary: How did Delphian Gallery come into being? What prompted you to start a gallery project that originated online?

Benjamin Murphy: We just decided to start creating opportunities for artists we liked and it essentially spiralled out of control.

WWW Contemporary: Where do you see your work positioned within the art world? How would you describe your operating model?

Benjamin Murphy: Delphian is a basically just a hobby. Both of us have our own artistic practice and are involved in other things both within the art world and outside of it. It's how we are able to be so flexible with it and to do things that might not seem to make a whole lot of sense financially (like not taking a percentage of sales from our open call winners group exhibition etc.) If we thought of it like a 'business' we would have to stop doing a lot of the most fun things, and it would become a job. Neither of us wants that.

Antisocial Isolation exhibition at Saatchi Gallery

Igor Moritz making work for his debut UK solo show Pulling Faces

WWW Contemporary: How would you describe Delphian’s taste and curatorial approach? Do you notice recurring themes or similarities in the exhibitions you bring together—if so, what kind?

Benjamin Murphy: Being a two person team, we're quite fortunate that our tastes align and we can both trust what the other is doing. We tend to exhibit a lot of painting but as for content and styles we tend to let the theme of the show dictate where we should be looking in terms of artworks to include. We believe that the show is more than just the sum of its parts and so try to think of it as one coherent unit instead of just a collection of individual works.

Jordy Kerwick's debut UK solo show

WWW Contemporary: You recently published the book The Artist’s Roadmap. What does the book explore?

Benjamin Murphy: It's a book of professional practice advice targeted at early-career artists. Unfortunately not much of that kind of thing is taught at universities and so it falls to people outside of those institutions to fill that shortfall. This new book is our attempt to do so. It builds upon some of the things covered in our first book (Navigating the Art World: Professional Practice for the Early Career Artist), and features many more things that we have learned since.

"The Artist’s Roadmap is a pocket-sized career guide for early-career artists, written from our direct experience of working within the contemporary art world. We’re not into empty-optimism or gatekeeping, and so it’s a practical, honest book about what it really means to build and sustain a professional practice today."

Read more about the book published by Thames & Hudson here: https://delphiangallery.com/the-artists-roadmap-book/