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Untitled (Bone Drawing), 1988
9 7/8 x 15 1/4 inches (each sheet: 9 7/8 x 7 5/8 inches)
Ballpoint pen on lined notebook paper (two sheets) 
Signed with orientation mark verso: “Elizabeth Murray”
Collection of the Murray-Holman Family Trust, New York



Elizabeth Murray (b. 1940, Chicago) was an artist at the forefront of American painting for five decades and is considered one of the most important postmodern abstract artists of her time. A groundbreaking artist who rode the line between tradition and unorthodox, Murray’s devotion to painting and mark making are constants in her vibrant body of work, and the familiar foundation that allowed her to bring the personal into abstraction.

Murray first gained recognition in the late 1970s with shaped canvases that she placed on the wall at unexpected angles, forms cutting across the plane and colors gyrating between them. She later broke the canvas further, eventually bulking up the pieces, lifting them at the corners, and overlapping them to create new found terrains. Moving from abstracted painted shapes, she began depicting objects from her daily life, her own version of Cezanne’s still lifes and Braque’s cubist figures. She breathed new life into domestic subject matter, with cups, plates, chairs, tables, and doors. Loopy figures use these objects, with limbs wrapping around furniture and leaping out at the viewer. Her luscious application of paint and color lifted the viewer into a universe of her own creation.

She earned a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Mills College in Oakland, California. Major one-woman shows appeared at the Dallas Museum of Art (1987, traveled to List Visual Arts Center at MIT; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Des Moines Art Center; Walker Art Center; and Whitney Museum of American Art), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1988), and The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2005). The recipient of many awards, Murray received the Skowhegan Medal in Painting in 1986, the Larry Aldrich Prize in Contemporary Art in 1993, and a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Award in 1999. Her work is featured in many collections, including Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Elizabeth Murray lived and worked in New York, and died in August 2007.  Biography courtesy The Estate of Elizabeth Murray.




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