Elizabeth Murray

In Spill One, Elizabeth Murray captures a cup just before its contents are emptied. This drawing performs the action in a very playful way: Murray tipped her trapezoid-shaped sheet of paper, making it appear quite literally at risk of falling over. The visual effect is underscored by the fact that the longest-and therefore heaviest-side of the sheet tilts to the left. Murray was known for her shaped canvases, using each work’s support as a primary aspect of its composition. Here the density of the black charcoal and white oil pastel lends additional visual weight, heightening the effect of the tilted paper. We can anticipate the end to come.

Elizabeth Murray (American, 1940-2007) made exuberant paintings that exploded the rectangle, so that the form of her work was busted wide open by its content. Taking inspiration from everyday objects such as a coffee mug or a shoe, her abstracted cartoon idioms, developed in the 1970s and 1980s, provide an extroverted counterpoint to the interiority of the Hairy Who. A classmate of Hairy Who artist Gladys Nilsson at the School of the Art Institute, Murray left Chicago for California and then New York in the mid-1960s. In New York, she restlessly explored the intersection between representation and abstraction. There she first made work that implied a narrative, then stripped it away to abstraction, and finally found a middle ground between the two.

Murray belongs to a generation of artists who reintroduced imagery and gestural mark-making to the predominantly cool, reductive aesthetic of the 1970s. This drawing was made during the year in which she began presenting recognizable subject matter, and its repeated circular forms are reminiscent of the abstract spirals of her previous work. The exuberance with which she depicts the coffee cup is characteristic of her best pieces, as is the unusual shape of the sheet. One might venture to see her fascination with spills, a recurring theme in her work, as a nod to the action of Pollock’s drip technique.