The Gladstone Gallery recently announced its representation of the Estate of Elizabeth Murray. Murray’s densely painted, often uniquely-shaped canvases and intuitive approach to depicting forms and colors in space transformed the course of art history and continue to have a significant impact on contemporary artists working today.
Born in 1940 in Chicago, Murray had an interest in art from an early age. While attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, she was deeply influenced by the work of Paul Cézanne, which inspired her to pursue a degree in painting. After graduating in 1962, Murray received her MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California in 1964, and relocated to New York City in 1967.
In New York, Murray developed a singular artistic practice and honed her intuitive approach to masterfully combining shapes and colors in both two and three-dimensional spaces. Interested in the plastic qualities of paint, she spent the decade of the 1960s experimenting with soft sculpture. Her compositions from the 1970s, in which rhythmic symbols play across thickly-layered rectangular planes of color, demonstrate Murray’s astuteness at crafting and understanding form and highlight the artist’s hand during a period when Minimalism was the predominant movement in New York’s art scene. Her radical and trailblazing approach to art-making evolved with the introduction of massive sized, multi-panel works in relief configurations. These complex canvases that began in the early 1980s and continued until her death in 2007, challenged the very definition of painting. When her spirals and pregnant commas began to suggest recognizable forms—cups, tables, chairs—the narrative of the work was labeled “domestic.” To this, she replied, “Cézanne painted cups and saucers and apples, and no one assumed he spent a lot of time in the kitchen.” Bridging Cubism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism, Murray was instrumental in reawakening the power of painting, and her expansive body of work continues to influence and inspire artists, writers, and curators in profound and eye-opening ways.
Information provided by the Gladstone Gallery. For more information, please contact Gladstone Gallery’s Andrew Huff: ahuff@gladstonegallery.com
Image: Elizabeth Murray in her Duane Street studio with Switchback (in progress), New York (c1996).
Photography by In Out Studio Inc. © The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS)
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