Elizabeth Murray

Elizabeth Murray (b. 1940, Chicago; d. 2007, New York) received a B.F.A. from the Art Institute of Chicago (1962) and an M.F.A. from Mills College in Oakland, CA (1964). In addition to her teaching position at Bard College (Annandale-on-Hudson, NY), Murray held visiting faculty appointments at a number of American colleges and universities. Murray first exhibited at the Paula Cooper Gallery in 1974. Murray’s work has been the subject of nearly sixty solo exhibitions in galleries around the world since her New York City debut in the 1972 Annual Exhibition: Contemporary American Painting at the Whitney Museum of American Art and has participated in six Whitney Biennial exhibitions since 1973. Elizabeth Murray’s work can be found in over forty public collections in the United States.

A pioneer in painting, Murray’s distinctively shaped canvases break with the art-historical tradition of illusionistic space in two-dimensions. Jutting out from the wall and sculptural in form, Murray’s paintings and watercolors playfully blur the line between the painting as an object and the painting as a space for depicting objects.

(http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/elizabeth-murray, http://www.pacegallery.com/artists/318/elizabeth-murray)