The American painter mixes comic-book symbolism and domestic imagery in her striking, crazily shaped canvases. By Skye Sherwin
Mixing it …
Elizabeth Murray's genre-bending 1998 painting fused abstraction and pop, while drawing on everything from cubism to surrealism, the comic books she religiously read and drew as a kid in Chicago, and the graffiti she saw plastered across the walls of 70s and 80s New York.
Pull shapes …
Ultimately, what Murray came up with in her four-decade career was very much her own. Most striking are the crazy-shaped canvases, which might be overlain or turn fully 3D, pushing painting's status as both image and object by swooshing off the walls.
Image: Elizabeth Murray, Maybe True, 1998
Oil on canvas, 274.3 x 229.9 cm, 108 x 90 1/2 in
© The Murray-Holman Family Trust / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York / DACS 2018
Courtesy Pace Gallery
