Elizabeth Murray
1940–2007
In 1967 Elizabeth Murray left the Midwest and arrived in a New York art world dominated by the cool, spare, and cerebral modes of Minimalism and Conceptualism. Although she experimented in these veins, her preferred medium was painting, then under critical scrutiny and often disdained. Over the course of the next four decades, Murray pioneered a spirited pictorial practice that drew as much from popular art sources such as cartoons as from revered art-historical antecedents, including Cubism, Surrealism, and Abstract Expressionism. The distinction between figuration and abstraction was another divide with which Murray’s boldly expressive art readily dispensed, and it similarly ignored the prohibition on high art bearing personal, domestic, or biographical associations. Serious and sensuous at once, Murray’s lively, large-scale canvases took shape in a variety of formats, some contoured, layered, fractured, or multipanel.
Children Meeting was executed just as Murray was beginning to consolidate her signature style; in her words, the painting “grew out of a confidence about being able to lay down the colors and put in the goofy shapes that were beginning to emerge. . . . I’d never allowed myself to use that zany purple.” This vibrant violet strikes an uneasy balance with the adjacent emerald hue, in turn underscoring other unexpected harmonies— the conjunction of zigzags and rectilinear outlines, for example, or the meeting of hard-edged forms with organic shapes. Murray’s central biomorphs, while resolutely abstract, seem simultaneously to take on an embodied presence: perhaps they are the children of the painting’s title.
Introduction
Elizabeth Murray (September 6, 1940 – August 12, 2007) was an American painter, printmaker and draughtsman. Her works are in many major public collections, including those of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Carnegie Museum of Art, and the Wadsworth Atheneum. Murray was known for her use of shaped canvases.
Wikidata identifier
Q212426
Information from Wikipedia, made available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License . Accessed May 25, 2025.
Country of birth
United States
Roles
Artist, author, landscape gardener, painter, photographer
ULAN identifier
500025911
Names
Elizabeth Murray, Elizabeth Murphy
Information from the Getty Research Institute's Union List of Artist Names ® (ULAN), made available under the ODC Attribution License. Accessed May 25, 2025.
