The Museum of Modern Art hosted an Elizabeth Murray retrospective in 2005, an honor the museum bestows on few living artists. When announcing the show, they described her inventive work:
“Over the course of more than four decades, she has transformed painting’s conventions to forge an original artistic idiom through the use of vivid colors, boldly inventive forms, and shaped, constructed, multi-paneled canvases. Murray’s paintings are animated by recurring biomorphic shapes and vibrant images of domestic objects—cups, glasses, spoons, chairs, tables, and shoes—by which the artist subverts the viewer’s notion of the familiar.”
From an early age, Murray wanted to be an artist. She graduated from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1962 and then got an MFA from Mills College outside San Francisco. She settled in New York City in 1967. By the mid-1970s, she landed on her distinctive style and was represented by Paula Cooper Gallery, a gallery with a reputation for spotting young talent. In 1996, Pace Gallery started to represent her. Over her career, Murray had more than seventy one-person shows at galleries across the United States and Europe. Museums were early buyers. More than forty public collections in the United States have her work, including the Art Institute of Chicago, MoMA, the Whitney Museum, the Guggenheim Museum, and the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis. She was the recipient of a MacArthur Foundation “Genius Grant” in 1999. The artist passed away in 2007 from complications associated with lung cancer.
Note: This profile is an extract from Art Collecting Today: Market Insights for Everyone Passionate About Art, a book by Doug Woodham (my husband) that is being published this April by Allworth Press.
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