Elizabeth Murray

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Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago in 1940. She earned a BFA at the Art

Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. A

pioneer in painting, Murray’s distinctively shaped canvases break with the art-historical tradition of

illusionistic space in two-dimensions…

This is pop art with an attitude. Elizabeth Murray produces singularly free-wheeling imagery of cartoonish

simplicity and expressionist distortion. She breaks down the typical feeling for space by cutting and splicing colorful

swaths of paper and folding and curling pieces into relief, while retaining the

power of flat-pattern design.

Her still lifes are reminiscent of paintings by masters such as Cezzane, Picasso, and Matisse; however, like her entire body of work, Murray's

paintings rejuvenate old art forms. Breathing life into domestic subject matter, Murray's

paintings often include images of cups, drawers, utensils, chairs, and tables.

These familiar objects are matched with cartoonish fingers and floating eyeballs, macabre images that are as nightmarish as they are goofy. Taken in as a

whole, Murray's paintings are abstract compositions rendered in bold colors and multiple

layers of paint. But the details of the paintings reveal a fascination with dream states and the

psychological underbelly of domestic life.

What makes her work truly remarkable, is the playful decorativeness, aggressive colors, large biomorphic shapes, are infused with an intense honesty and

integrity in the process of relating the personal reaction to the geographic

environment.