Artist Research Assignment

Elizabeth Murray

Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago in 1940. She received a BFA at the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. Murray lived and worked in New York, and died in August 2007. She was a pioneer in painting. Murray had a distinctive shaped canvase break with the art-historical tradition of illusionistic space in two-dimensions. Her artwork took the shape of Jutting out from walls and are sculptural in form. Many of her paintings and watercolors offer a playfully blurred line with the painting as an object, and the painting as a space for depicting objects. Murray’s still lifes are reflective of paintings by masters such as Cézanne, Picasso, and Matisse. However, like Murray’s entire body of work, her paintings give life to old art forms. Murray’s paintings breath life into domestic subject matter, and often include images of cups, drawers, utensils, chairs, and tables. Working with these familiar objects, she has matched her these objects with cartoonish fingers and floating eyeballs. Murray’s paintings are abstract compositions created in bold colors and multiple layers of paint. The details of the paintings reveal a fascination with dream like qualities and the psychological underbelly of domestic life; offering her inspiration for artwork. She was the recipient of many awards, receiving the Skowhegan Medal in Painting in 1986, the Larry Aldrich Prize in Contemporary Art in 1993, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award in 1999. Murray’s work is featured in many collections, including Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles.
I enjoy Murray's art work because it is so unique. I love how it takes different parts of the body, like the fingers in image one, and distorts them, and then combines them back together in sort of a puzzle.