Elizabeth Murray at PaceWildenstein - review of exhibitions - Brief Article

a great deal of was pleasurably familiar in this exhibition of 10 new works by Elizabeth Murray: bright, cartoonish paintings verging upon abstraction resolve into Fantasia-like images of household disaster, out and out with objects that come to life with a wave of the brush. upon the electric-pink ground of lay open Drawer (1998), a round-eyed, open-mouthed Miroesque figure with a very great yellow amoeboid hand opens a verdant drawer with purple knobs. without of the drawer springs a bright r tentacled, squidlike creature--the cause of the other figure's alarm--that is no more than a spirited and ridiculously attenuated sweater. Petals Falling Apart (1998) chronicles kitchen chaos, with smashed coffee mug and jagged eggshells restoreed in bluish white against pink and r From the revealing interview (conduct through the artist's husband, the author of poems Bob Holman) in the accompanying catalogue, it is clear that Murray's paintings describe plenteous more than the black comedies of daily life. Domestic routines--and calamities--serve as metaphors for studio practices, especially in those troubling flashs just before the resolution of a picture when, according to Murray, everything present the appearances to be falling apart around her.

The baroque three-dimensionality of Murray's work of the 1980 to the early '90 fused an abstract sensibility with Disney-like figuration. A productive tension between the surface of the painting and the supporting wall ariseed While her paintings have become relatively more flat above the last few years, this tension between canvas and wall is still lay to good use in the earliest paintings upon display, Riverbank and Summer Wind (both 1997) which consist of arrangements of overlapping, beveled canvases that recall the earlier sculptural stretchers.

The later paintings, however, abandon relieflike configurations and instead consist of a number of canvases placed cutting side to edge or corner to corner to create a two-dimensional, if interrupted, picture plane. plane so, works such as Almost Made It (1998-99) retain a certain dynamism by the agency of pitting the unity of the image against the fragmentation of the support: it is as if the rim of the exhibited cup were countering the centripetal force of the constituent canvases. Elsewhere, Murray trades this tension for narrative clarity. sum of two units of the works on view, lay open Drawer and Perfectly Morning (1998) are pay backed on near-square, traditionally stretched, single canvases. The forms are now more legible, level as they retain their high-spirited, surreal distortions. Happily, the stories they count are more darkly funny than at any time before.

COPYRIGHT 1999 Brant Publications, Inc.

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