Artists & Works

Elizabeth Murray has found a way to insert playful, pop-related elements into basically abstract paintings. She often grounds her paintings in simple everyday objects, using aggressive colors and biomorphic shapes that have a comic appeal. In fact, Murray was interested in comic strips early in her career, as well as ways to introduce three-dimensional elements into paintings. Her often-chaotic combinations of elements share their energy with the works of Judy Pfaff, among others.

Murray's paintings can be found in most major collections of contemporary art, including museums all over the world. A traveling retrospective of her work was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1988.

CRITICAL EXCERPTS

Steven Henry Madoff, ARTnews feature, 11/83
"Elizabeth Murray's brushes are less fraught with the air of crisis than Jensen's. Though both show share a predilection for biomorphic forms transacted just beyond the borders of recognition, she quotes more freely from the world, presenting fragmented images,,arranged in...conjunction. Her metaphorically complex yet playful images seem to represent the common condition of modernity, in which we are always trying to escape from the constraints of society while remaining subject to its rule. In formal terms, her paintings seem to be on the verge of disintegration, even as they tenuously cohere. ...'I wouldn't disagree with the critic who said my paintings are like toys. They're like toys for the imagination.'"

Interview with Elizabeth Murray by Greg Masters, Artchive, 1998
" Making art is such an incredible experience because every time you're doing something, like the formal thing...When I got to that place I was really excited. For a brief period of time, say between '74 and '77, it seemed like I really got myself grounded in a way, and I cleared the decks. I felt that that work was really about clearing the decks and focusing on the structure and I began to work with the shapes and focusing on the paint and thinking in very simple terms about what a painting could be. In a way, as dumb or as simple as possible. But then what started to happen was the formal thing began to be boring. The formality quickly turns into a series of devices and instead of it being learning it was all stuff I knew. So what I began to do was not give up the formal structure but sort of throw more things in. And then it just began to be more and more decorative. And then I think the shapes started to show me that they became real things. I'd be able to have the abstraction of a shape and then an image could go into that abstract-anything structure and give it this other element. Make this other thing happen in the painting....

[aboud the shaped canvases] When I started to do it it felt like I was just bored with flat shapes. When I did the shattered things I really knew that there was something there that was very psychological for me. The shattered pieces were about really feeling that one could be broken and yet . . . I was thinking of taking a painting and actually breaking it into pieces and then using an image to pull it together and that felt extremely psychological and a reality in my life. I don't feel that uncommon. It is something you struggle with. But it felt metaphorical that way. And that was when I was realizing that the shapes were really extremely meaningful to me. There was a way I could use them where I could find out a lot about myself by working with the shapes. When I first began the shapes I was just doing this and that. It would be a single shape on the wall and then it just felt like another way to use edges."