18 3/8 x 11 7/8 x 1 3/8 inches, framed
Elizabeth Murray (b. 1940 Chicago, IL, d. 2007, Granville, NY) was an artist at the forefront of American painting for five decades and is considered one of the most important postmodern abstract artists of her time. Her drive and determination produced a singularly innovative body of work characterized by a Cubist-informed Minimalism and streetwise Surrealism. Throughout her career, she reveled in the physicality of paint and approached her work through the constructive vocabulary of sculpture, warping, twisting, splintering, and knotting her canvases.
Within Murray’s legacy as an inventive painter, drawing played a critical role; providing insight into her drive to blur traditional distinctions between abstraction and figuration in order to make work that was both intimate and formally muscular.
Unencumbered by the demands of large-scale painting, Murray found, through drawing, an explosive freedom in mark-making that also served as a quick way to work through compositional problems before beginning her complex paintings. Murray’s drawings serve as both studies for paintings and standalone works, capturing the gradual emergence of images and ideas from initial sketches to polished pictorial illusions, reflecting her unwavering experimentation and dissatisfaction with pat or pre-determined solutions.
Elizabeth Murray’s work has been the subject of numerous institutional exhibitions, including the Carnegie Museum of Art; Contemporary Arts Museum; University at Buffalo Art Galleries; The Museum of Modern Art; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center, MIT; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Des Moines Art Center; Walker Art Center; and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Elizabeth Murray: Painters Progress opened at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, on 4 March and will remain on view through 25 May 2026.
Murray’s work can be found in over ninety public collections in North America, Asia, and Europe, including Art Institute of Chicago; Brooklyn Museum; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The
Metropolitan Museum of Art; The Morgan Library & Museum; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; The Museum of Modern Art; National Gallery of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum; Walker Art Center; Whitney Museum of American Art; and Yale University Art Gallery.
