Elizabeth Murray

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.