Retrospective Of Elizabeth Murray's Contemporary Paintings At MoMA

NEW YORK CITY

:The Museum of Modern Art presents "Elizabeth Murray," a major retrospective comprising more than 70 paintings and works on paper dating from 1963 to 2005 by New York-based artist Elizabeth Murray (American, born 1940), in the broadest survey to date of her 42-year career.

The exhibition showcases her complete body of work, focusing on her large scale, multipaneled, shaped canvases, including her most recent work, "The Sun and the Moon," 2005. Organized in a loosely chronological fashion, the retrospective incorporates a selection of the artist's notebooks and drawings to further illuminate her prolific and consistently innovative career.

This retrospective indicates the museum's longstanding commitment to Murray's art, which began in 1983 when two works entered the collection: the 1981 painting "Painter's Progress" and an untitled print from 1982. "Painters Progress" and four other works from the MoMA collection are included in the exhibition. In 1995, Murray was selected to curate an Artist's Choice exhibition at MoMA titled "Elizabeth Murray: Modern Women at the Museum of Modern Art."

Murray belongs to a generation of artists who emerged in the 1970s and whose exposure to Cubist-derived Minimalism and Surrealist-influenced Pop inspired experimentation with new modes of expression that would bridge the gap between these historical models. Over the course of more than four decades, she has transformed painting's conventions to forge an original artistic idiom through the use of vivid colors, boldly inventive forms and shaped, constructed, multipaneled canvases. Murray's paintings are animated by recurring biomorphic shapes and vibrant images of domestic objects - cups, glasses, spoons, chairs, tables and shoes - by which the artist subverts the viewer's notion of the familiar.

Murray's early works reflect her synthesis of images from periods of art history into compositions that also manifest her affinity for cartooning. In "Night Empire," 1967-68, Murray creates an iconic and decoratively framed Pop rendering of the Empire State Building. Demonstrating her interest in the modular aspects of Minimalism, which was the dominant style in New York during this period, Murray painted works such as 1970 untitled piece based on Paul Cezanne's paintings of card players and incorporated images and forms that recalled the Cubist works of Pablo Picasso and Juan Gris, such as "Beer Glass at Noon," 1971.

Murray soon began an investigation into geometric forms. Two paintings in the exhibition called "Mobius Band," both 1974, are emblematic of her interest in Mobius strips - endless loops comprising a band that is twisted 180 degrees and joined at two ends. "Pink Spiral Leap," 1975, marked a subsequent transformation of scale and form - at nearly 61/2 feet square, the paintings shows lines released from their mathematical confines to resemble a spring pressing out against the edges of the canvas.

Biomorphic imagery and another dramatic increase in scale to approximately 91/2 square, characterize "Beginner," 1976, a painting whose primary image Murray has described as a "Tweety Bird shape."

"Tug" and "With," both 1978, are the first works in the exhibition to show Murray's incorporation of geometric and biomorphic forms onto angular shaped frames. During the early 1980s, Murray embarked on a period of intense experimentation with structures formed by the abutment and overlap of multiple canvases. The flowering of her work at this time can be seen in "Painter's Progress," 1981, in which the fragments of Cubism and the arabesques of Surrealism are locked together in a virtuoso composition depicting a palette and brushes, the essential tools of a painter.

In the mid-1980s, Murray conceived and fabricated elaborate supports for the curved paintings she created, making uniquely voluminous stretchers over which she placed her canvases. Works such as "Wonderful World," 1988, "True Air," 1988, and "Euclid," 1989, are examples of these inventive sculptural constructions with their bulging bodies and three-dimensional extremities.

Shoes are another domestic subject explored in depth by Murray. Shown in numerous paintings depicting oversized footwear, as with "Trembling Foot," 1988, Murray draws on multiple inspirations to make shoes her subject.

In the early 1990s, Murray departed from her involvement with heavily built-out paintings. The rest of the decade is characterized by flatter paintings, though still three-dimensional, that are both multi-and single-paneled. Murray's color brightens from 1992-93 onward and her subjects become more antic, as with "Bounding Dog," 1993-94, as well as shaped canvases such as "What Is Love," 1995, and "Button Painting," 1996.

By 2000, Murray's work acquired a new complexity involving many cut out shapes that resemble the symbols in a comic book thought balloon. This technique is exemplified by "Do the Dance," 2005.

The Museum of Modern Art is at 11 West 53rd Street. For information, 212-708-9400 or www.moma.org.