Elizabeth Murray

by Robert Storr

Elizabeth Murray has radically altered the structure of Modernist painting. Her shaped and constructed canvases, often topologically modeled in three dimensions or fitted together out of multiple jigsaw-like parts, treat figure and ground in unprecedented ways, giving the elastic shapes of classic Surrealism a space in their own image. The alternatively comfortable and cataclysmic world that her images depict would crack irreveocably if it followed Euclidean logic; instead, it constantly metamorphoses under stress. With a chaptered essay by Robert Storr, plate section, an in-depth interview, the book will explore Murray's relation to artists such as Joan Miro, Stuart Davis, Claes Oldenburg and Frank Stella, as well as to the mainstream and opened up options for rising generations. This book accompanies ths most detailed examination of Murray's art yet mounted, showing its development from Pop-oriented reliefs in the 1960s to the extraordinary volumetric of her recent work.