Word: murrays
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...answer was: you bet. Murray's work was not only a hoot, it was deeply intelligent, full of careful deliberations about the interplay of color and form and how together they produce meaning. Like Howard Hodgkin, or for that matter Matisse, she offered us a bright, beckoning palette as a point of entry into all kinds of sophisticated reckonings with form. And though her work is full of references to comic books and cartoons, she didn't put them there as lazy quotations, a means by which to lend herself pop culture street cred. She connected her memories of Disney...
...where she was headed was someplace very unusual. By the early 1980s Murray was routinely breaking out of the confines of the standard rectangular canvas, going instead for supports shaped like thunderbolts, clouds or shapes-with-no-name that she would combine sometimes into complicated puzzle pieces. Working in a jumped-up palette of citric yellows, Band-Aid pinks, acidic greens and plum purples, she made pictures that were semi-abstract, but full of teasing references to the outside world, like the outlines of shoes and tables. Or two conjoined canvases might take on the shape...
With the death of Elizabeth Murray at age 66 on Sunday, America lost one of its smartest, slyest, most exuberant painters. Merv Griffin will get longer eulogies this week. But trust me, when The Wheel of Fortune is done spinning, she's the one who will matter a great deal more. And it's precisely at this moment, when so much of the fantasy offered to us by mass culture is calculated industrial product, in formulations arrived at by Hollywood or by whichever multinational is fine-tuning the next big video game, that her work feels especially important. She stood...
...begin with, Murray was a crucial figure in the struggle to bring painting back to life in the 1970s and early '80s. If there was one thing that nearly everybody in the art world knew back then, it was that painting was yesterday's news. Real artists did installations, or sawed houses in half or got behind the controls of a bulldozer and piled up earthworks - anything other than pick up a hairy brush and use it to drag that ancient mud called pigment across a piece of cloth...
...getting thinner and flatter, Pop gave artists a way to reintroduce the recognizable imagery that Greenberg thought was hopelessly retro. But by the '70s the energies of Pop were running out too. Painting appeared to have painted itself into a dead end. It was just around then that Murray, who was born in Chicago in 1940, got seriously to work. Murray had graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1962 and arrived in New York City five years later with her first husband, a sculptor. She would be one of a growing number of artists - Susan Rothenberg, Philip Guston...