NYAB Event - Elizabeth Murray “Exuberance Unbound”

Elizabeth Murray “Exuberance Unbound”

Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl

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Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl presents a survey of works created by Elizabeth Murray in collaboration with Gemini G.E.L., the Los Angeles‐based artists’ workshop. Included in the exhibition will be examples of bodies of work dating from her first Gemini project, published in 1993,through herlast, published in 2006.

Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago in 1940 and resided in New York for much of her career, until her untimely passing in 2007. Uniquely her own and in no way derivative, Murray’s work is indebted to artists such as Philip Guston, Henri Matisse, Paul Cezanne, and, less often mentioned, Lee Bontecou. Murray’s art is serious but has whimsy; it is personally domestic yet open to broader interpretations. Many of her highly inventive paintings border on sculptures, in thatthey were often constructed of canvasstretched over bulging wooden forms. Her printmaking endeavors closely followed this same direction; of the 39 series or editions Murray created at Gemini, 13 are 3‐dimensional. Murray whirled into motion ordinary objects – shoes, cups,tables, dogs, and more – and brought them to the precipice of abstraction, creating a vocabulary of imagery distanced from the obvious yet sufficiently reigned in to be familiar. This was her signature, her trademark, and for it she wasinternationally acclaimed. Amongst her many achievements, in 2005, Murray wasthe first artist to have a solo painting exhibition in the Museumof Modern Art’s newly renovated galleries, and one of only four women to be honored with a retrospective atthatinstitution.

Going beyond the ordinary print was Murray’s typical collaboration with the Gemini workshop. Herfirst project, a series of uniquely pastelled and collaged “prints” titled Thirty Eight, immediately setthe tone forlater collaborations, in which she would come to the workshop, use the printmaking facilities to create printed basics for her collages, and then spend her time at the shop cutting, collaging and coloring each individual work in the series. Even when she did create editioned prints,they were often significantly 3‐dimensional, as seen in workssuch as Body and Soul, Capree and Radish (all dating from2001). Replete with vibrant colors and elaborately constructed imagery, Murray’s Gemini projects run the gambit – from sensitively rendered, intimate lithographs and etchings, to dramatic, bold, large‐scale expressive works. In Murray’s graphic oeuvre,there’ssomething for everyone.

Media

• Painting
• Drawing
• Prints

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