Elizabeth Murray

Elizabeth Murray (b. 1940, Chicago, IL—d. 2007, Granville, NY) was an artist at the forefront of American painting for five decades and is considered one of the most important postmodern abstract artists of her time. Her drive and determination produced a singularly innovative body of work characterized by a Cubist-informed Minimalism and streetwise Surrealism. Throughout her career, she reveled in the physicality of paint and approached her work through the constructive vocabulary of sculpture, warping, twisting, splintering, and knotting her canvases. In her innovative and deeply imaginative body of work, Murray not only reclaimed the medium of paint as her own but shared personal evocations of birth and death, laughter and confusion, fullness and loss.

From an early age, Murray wanted to be an artist—a cartoonist actually. With the support of her high-school art teacher, Elizabeth Stein, Murray enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago with the aim of becoming a commercial artist. However, she would spend more time learning from the works on view in the museum than in the classroom, gravitating toward the paintings of El Greco, Francisco de Zurbarán, Georges Seurat, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso. Above all, it was the work of Paul Cézanne and Willem de Kooning that fueled her commitment to becoming a painter. After graduating in 1962, she went on to continue her studies at Mills College in Oakland, California. In 1967, she moved to New York City, where she would live and work until her death in 2007.

Murray’s works from the 1960s reflect an irreverent embrace of the materiality of paint. Here, the artist experimented with elements of sculpture while maintaining allusions to the figure informed by her long-standing affinity for cartooning. Murray’s childhood love of Walt Disney and comics would underpin many aspects of her art throughout her career. During the 1970s, Murray dismantled—then rebuilt—many of the compositional strategies and theories associated with Minimalism. Using curved lines and complex shapes loosely informed by mathematical ideas, she introduced geometries that transform scale, shape, and form to her thickly painted and layered compositions. In the following decade, Murray introduced three-dimensionality to her canvases, bringing about a complete break from traditional, flat, rectilinear compositions. Muddied, moody, and gestural, the paintings of the 1980s blazed a course of international recognition and notoriety. In these works, interiors, tables, coffee cups, shoes, and other signature themes emerge from skeins of spray paint and graffiti-like markings. During the 1990s, Murray’s works became flatter while retaining a high degree of compositional elaboration and chromatic exuberance. In the final years of her career, the artist offered new visions of her characteristic motifs in vibrantly painted, multipaneled paintings.

Throughout her stellar career, Murray was a much sought-after instructor, visiting artist, and lecturer. Appointments include instructor at Rosary Hill College (1965–67), visiting artist at Wayne State University and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1973), instructor at Bard College (1974–77), visiting instructor at California Institute of the Arts (1975–76), lecturer at Princeton University (1977), instructor at Yale University (1977–80), instructor at School of Visual Arts in New York (1978–80), lecturer at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1979, 1985, and 1992), lecturer at Maryland Institute College of Art (1981), lecturer at New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture (1987), guest curator of Artist’s Choice: Elizabeth Murray at The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1995), visiting professor of studio arts at Bard College (1999–2003), and instructor at Brooklyn College (2003–07).

Murray received numerous honors in recognition of her work, including the Walter M. Campana Award from The Art Institute of Chicago (1982), an award from American Academy of Arts and Letters (1984), Medal for Painting from Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture (1986), an honorary doctorate from School of the Art Institute of Chicago (1992), induction as an elected member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York (1992), Larry Aldrich Award (1993), an honorary degree from Rhode Island School of Design (1993), MacArthur Fellowship (1999), an honorary doctorate from The New School (2001), National Artist Award from Anderson Ranch Art Center (2002), Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement from College Art Association (2007), and an award from CITYarts (2007).

Significant public commissions include two New York City Transit mural projects: Blooming (1996) at Lexington Avenue/59th Street and Stream (2001) at 23rd Street/Ely Avenue.

Monographic institutional presentations include Elizabeth Murray: Drawings 1980–1986 at Carnegie Mellon University Art Gallery (1986), Elizabeth Murray: Paintings and Drawings at Dallas Museum of Art (1987, traveled to List Visual Arts Center at MIT; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Des Moines Art Center; Walker Art Center; and Whitney Museum of American Art), Elizabeth Murray: New Work at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1988), Elizabeth Murray Prints: 1979–1990 at Barbara Krakow Gallery (1990, traveled to Bates College Museum of Art, David Winton Bell Gallery at Brown University, Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University, and Florida Gulf Coast Art Center), Elizabeth Murray: Recent Work at Wexner Center for the Arts at The Ohio State University (1991), Elizabeth Murray at Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art at Johnson County Community College (1993), and Elizabeth Murray: Works on Paper, Virginia Commonwealth University (1998).

In 2005, Murray earned the distinction of becoming only the fifth woman to receive a career retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, following Louise Bourgeois, Lee Krasner, Helen Frankenthaler, and Jackie Winsor. Elizabeth Murray included more than seventy-five paintings and works on paper spanning the whole of Murray’s career. The exhibition traveled the following year to Institut Valencià d’Art Modern.

Significant posthumous exhibitions include Elizabeth Murray at The Arts Club of Chicago (2009), Elizabeth Murray: Heart and Mind at Brooklyn Academy of Music (2016), Elizabeth Murray: When the House is Quiet at Galerie Maria Bernheim (2016), Elizabeth Murray at MAMCO Geneva (2016), Spotlight on Elizabeth Murray at Anderson Collection at Stanford University (2018), Elizabeth Murray: Flying Bye at Camden Art Centre (2019), and Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town at UB Art Galleries (2021).

Murray’s work can be found in over ninety public collections in North America, Asia, and Europe. The Estate of Elizabeth Murray is exclusively represented by Gladstone Gallery, New York and Brussels.