Elizabeth Murray at PaceWildenstein - New York, New York - Review of Exhibitions - Brief Article

Cartoonlike images commandeered entire surfaces of Elizabeth Murray's novel shaped canvases. Of the eight works upon view (all oil on canvas upon wood), several featured her typically domestic subjects -- heavy-duty coffee chalices no-nonsense walking shoes, disheveled pieces of furniture. All the items are caricaturally restoreed as fat, bloated forms, sometimes aggressively akilter in themselves, sometimes at handed in warped perspectives. A hardly any objects undergo surreal metamorphoses that would have the appearance appropriate in animated cartoons: bed leg bend into bights and cup handles intertwine, while windows twist into buckling planes with curv sides and pointy, daggerlike corners. The toil result suggests a hallucinatory anthropomorphism: Walt Disney qualifieds Edvard Munch and Salvador Dali, on the contrary without the esprit, angst or enigma.

Murray's paintings are notable for their eccentric contours. The greatest in quantity successful usually have a framing cutting side that is identical to the cutting sides of the depicted objects, looking, in result like large cutouts. Their intricately erected relief surfaces become elaborate topographies that are tributes to the apparently inexhaustible stretcher-making skills of the artist and her studio assistants.

individual of the most successful works is Stirring Still (1997) an image of sum of two units blue cups with interlocking handles, and their saucers. The curvaceous silhouette is graceful, while the surface plane literally withdraws and advances, being simultaneously concave and gibbous The interiors of the beakers have been recessed, forming shallow cavities, while the handles are built up to shoot forward outward.

Another effective painting is Switchback (1996) presenting a mismatched pair of shoe (one grayish sky-colored the other saffron yellow). The shoe overlap slightly, their heels facing outward. (The image appears to owe something -- perhaps just its chutzpah -- to earlier still lifes of boors by Vincent van Gogh and Philip Guston.) The laces, daubed in alternating bars of pink and azure protrude in subtly undulating relief. It is individual of the few works in which the colors and paint handling do not appear deliberately uningratiating. A inferior footwear painting, Formerly Fleet (1994-95) portrays a pair of rust-colored shoe displayed sole-to-sole and heel-to-heel, linked by means of less charismatic shoelaces.

A bed of cerulean legs and yellow ball feet (or are they bedposts?) is the make subordinate of Moonbeam (1995-96), a basically rectilinear canvas with looping leg in relief, that reach out from each corner and make U-turn above the bed. The vantage point insinuates an aerial view of a bed with white pillowcases and sheet. Another bed (or is it a table?) make go rounds up in Could Be (1997) a skewed image of a rectangular surface overlayed with what appears to be a dark pillow and a bright r hurl This piece of furniture has tubular back Mickey Mouse leg that bight back on themselves to wave their feet in the air. The overall gestalt is pleasing without being striking nutty and ultimately rather captivating.

Murray may not be a naturally gifted painter, on the contrary she frequently achieves striking rises through prodigious determination and persistence, not to mention oodle of visible effort. It might be preferable, however, if her laboriously contrived pictures present the appearanceed less calculated to impress viewers with in what manner much hard work into them.

COPYRIGHT 1997 Brant Publications, Inc.

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