{"data":{"id":"930","type":"artist","attributes":{"id":930,"topgoose_id":1547,"tms_id":930,"display_name":"Elizabeth Murray","sort_name":"Murray Elizabeth","display_date":"1940–2007","begin_date":"1940","end_date":"2007","biography":"\u003cp\u003eIn 1967 Elizabeth Murray left the Midwest\nand arrived in a New York art world\ndominated by the cool, spare, and cerebral\nmodes of Minimalism and Conceptualism.\nAlthough she experimented in these\nveins, her preferred medium was painting,\nthen under critical scrutiny and often\ndisdained. Over the course of the next four\ndecades, Murray pioneered a spirited\npictorial practice that drew as much from\npopular art sources such as cartoons as\nfrom revered art-historical antecedents,\nincluding Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract\nExpressionism. The distinction between\nfiguration and abstraction was another\ndivide with which Murray’s boldly expressive\nart readily dispensed, and it similarly\nignored the prohibition on high art bearing\npersonal, domestic, or biographical\nassociations. Serious and sensuous at\nonce, Murray’s lively, large-scale canvases\ntook shape in a variety of formats, some\ncontoured, layered, fractured, or multipanel.\u003c/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e\n\u003ca href=\"/collection/works/2896\"\u003e\u003cem\u003eChildren Meeting\u003c/em\u003e\u003c/a\u003e was executed\njust as Murray was beginning to consolidate\nher signature style; in her words, the\npainting “grew out of a confidence about\nbeing able to lay down the colors and\nput in the goofy shapes that were\nbeginning to emerge. . . . I’d never allowed\nmyself to use that zany purple.” This\nvibrant violet strikes an uneasy balance\nwith the adjacent emerald hue, in turn\nunderscoring other unexpected harmonies—\nthe conjunction of zigzags and rectilinear\noutlines, for example, or the meeting\nof hard-edged forms with organic shapes.\nMurray’s central biomorphs, while resolutely\nabstract, seem simultaneously to take\non an embodied presence: perhaps they\nare the children of the painting’s title.\u003c/p\u003e","on_view":false,"artport":false,"biennial":true,"collection":true,"ulan_id":"500025911","wikidata_id":"Q212426","created_at":"2017-08-30T16:27:17.000-04:00","updated_at":"2026-04-11T07:03:28.270-04:00","links":{"artworks":"/api/artists/930/artworks","exhibitions":"/api/artists/930/exhibitions"}}}}