Stuart Collection: Elizabeth Murray - Red Shoe

Elizabeth Murray has radically altered the structure of Modernist painting. Her shaped and constructed canvases, often topologically modeled in three dimensions or fitted together out of multiple jigsaw-like parts, treat figure and ground in unprecedented ways, giving the elastic shapes of classic Surrealism a space in their own image. The alternatively comfortable and cataclysmic world that her images depict would crack irrevocably if it followed Euclidean logic; instead; it constantly metamorphoses under stress.

Prepared on the occassion of the exhibition Elizabeth Murray: Paintings and Drawings, organized by Sue Graze, Curator of Contemporary Art, Dallas Museum of Art, and Kathy Halbreich, former Director for the Albert and Vera List Visual Arts Center, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Elizabeth Murray has been moving forward fearlessly during more than 4 decades constantly inventing new shapes for the unique style of painting for which she is known. Her decision to become an artist was the result of an encounter with a still life by Cezanne at the Art Institute of Chicago as a student. Subsequently many artists had an impact on her thinking, the Surrealists, deKooning, and Guston, just to name a few. Earlier influences were the Sunday comics, which she grew up with, as well as popular culture in general. Remarkably she was able to distill all these impulses into an art that was distinctly her own. The Museum of Modern Art acknowledged her position in contemporary art with a large retrospective exhibition curated by Robert Storr. She died in 2007. Murray and Storr discuss the many milestones of her development as an artist before pertinent works in this radiant exhibition. This video provides rare insight into a significant artist's approach and progress