Judith Murray (artist)
[5][19] MoMA PS1 founder Alanna Heiss suggests that Murray has avoided predictability through a slow but constant evolution from her early hard-edged geometric abstraction to her later expressive style using gesture and impasto to evoke perceptual and tactile experiences.
[17][28] She works primarily in oil on linen canvases, producing paintings noted most for their luminous color, sense of light, and varied, tactile surfaces and markmaking;[24][29][30][2] critic Richard Kalina writes that her practice has "displayed clarity, discipline, and structure that function in marvelous counterpoint to the intuitive, the playful, and the evocative.
[4][31][35][10] Reviewing Murray's first major solo exhibition (Parsons-Truman, 1976), SoHo Weekly News critic John Perreault described her as a "non-conformist painter" whose images suggest an open-ended but withheld logic, like signs or diagrams; the Village Voice counted her "eccentric abstractions" among the highlights of the 1979 Whitney Biennial (e.g., Red Angle and Broadway, both 1978).
[4][22] The work Murray exhibited at the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts employed tapering arcs, dynamic lines, and splinter- and scimitar-like forms in more complex, energized compositions that recall Russian constructivism (e.g., Red Wing, 1980; Smoke, 1979–82).
[14] In the mid-1980s, Murray began experimenting with raised areas of thick pigment, layered underpainting and dappled, gently modeled figures and grounds in paintings that the New York Times noted for contrasts of mysterious light and blackness and dynamic versus subdued, gradually clarified forms (e.g., Mercury or Bishop, 1983–4).
[19][37][39][27] Alanna Heiss and Edward Leffingwell suggest that while Murray's subject is "paint itself," she simultaneously evokes real sensations such as evening light on water (the grays and calligraphic white marks of Primary Document, 2006) or the reds and pinks of a fiery sunset (Royal Flush, 2006).
[19][37][39][27] The atmospheric work Magnetic South (2006), a sunny, fluctuating field of thick yellow and pink strokes, is often cited as a bravura display of the Murray's ability to achieve equilibrium and coherent structure through dense, abstract gestures and color organization.
[29][1] Lilly Wei described Murray's "Continuum" show (2009) as continuing her shift to a more painterly mode with "explosive, complex, imbricated rhythms" that conjure "landscapes in flux, worlds in transition and the roiling energy of the cosmos.
[2][30] Murray's aptly named exhibition, "Tempest" (2018), featured mosaic-like, whirlwind compositions, overflowing with richly colored, energetic brushstrokes that reviews compare to swarms of bees or schools of fish crossing the picture plane.
[1] The show also introduced a new, late-career development: small, uncharacteristically quick-looking 11" x 14" canvasses employing a wider bar (to maintain the illusion of the square format), intersecting perspectives and interruptive gestures (e.g., Poof, Junction and Gaggle, 2017–8); they suggest buoyancy, movement and natural forces run amok.
