Gladstone presents Elizabeth Murray: Drawings (1974-2006), an exhibition of over sixty rarely seen works, curated by Kathy Halbreich. Familiar with Murray’s oeuvre across mediums, Halbreich co-organized the first retrospective of her work, Elizabeth Murray: Paintings and Drawings in 1987, which originated at the Dallas Museum of Art and traveled to major institutions nationally. Halbreich once again contributes to shaping Murray’s legacy as an inventive painter whose drawings provide insight into her drive to blur traditional distinctions between abstraction and figuration in order to make work that was both intimate and formally muscular. This exhibition expands understanding of how Murray used drawing as a critical tool. It also highlights how her hybrid experimentation laid the foundation for innovative artists working today, particularly those who embrace and portray the tensions of everyday life.
Elizabeth Murray’s expressive and often poignant work unites carefully crafted three-dimensional structures and layered surfaces that appear to be found through an almost jazz-like improvisation. Her works are starkly contrarian, avoiding easy categorization and resisting association with a singular historical movement or style. While painting as a medium fluctuated in popularity during the latter half of the 20th century, Murray’s aesthetic ambition, distinctive style and gestural certainty mined the ongoing rebellious qualities inherent in painting. Undeterred by the rise of conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and the growing popularity of video and performance art in the 70s, Murray challenged the prevailing belief that painting was a less innovative and timely medium with her irregularly shaped and often monumental canvases, destabilized and surreal interiors, and biomorphic often cartoon-like forms.
Through this presentation of drawings spanning from 1974 to 2006, Halbreich foregrounds work of all sizes and finishes that has remained largely unseen. Unencumbered by the demands of large-scale painting, Murray found, through drawing, an explosive freedom in mark-making that also served as a quick way to work through compositional problems before beginning her complex paintings. Murray’s drawings serve as both studies for paintings and standalone works, capturing the gradual emergence of images and ideas from initial sketches to polished pictorial illusions, reflecting her unwavering experimentation and dissatisfaction with pat or pre-determined solutions.
