Art: 21
Born
1940, Chicago, IL
Education
BFA, Art Institute of Chicago
MFA, Mills College, CA
Lives and Works
New York City
Media & Materials
Oil and watercolor painting,
drawing
Biography
Elizabeth Murray’s distinctively
shaped canvases break with
the art-historical tradition of
the two-dimensional picture-plane. Jutting out from the
wall and sculptural in form,
Murray’s oil paintings and
watercolors playfully blur the
line between the painting as
an object and the painting as
a space for depicting objects.
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
cartoon-like fingers and floating eyeballs. Abstraction is a
key component in Murray’s
work. Taken 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.
Artists Speak
Elizabeth Murray
“For a couple of years I’ve been working with cutting out shapes and kind of glom-ming them together and letting it go where it may, like basically making a zigzag
shape and making a rectangular shape and a circular, bloopy, fat, cloudy shape and
just putting them all together, and letting the cards fall where they may.
Top: Worm’s Eye, 2002. Oil on canvas, 8 x 7. 6' (244 x 231 cm). Photo by Ellen Page Wilson. Courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York. Bottom: Bop, Oil on canvas, 9' x 10" x 10' x 10 ½" ( 2. 7 m x 23
cm x 3 m x 27 cm). Photo by Ellen Page Wilson. Courtesy Pace Wildenstein, New York.
