Review: The New York Times: EM at CANADA
Elizabeth Murray’s “Look Back” (1995). Credit 2016 The Murray-Holman Family Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Ellen Page Wilson, Pace Gallery
The New York Times
By Roberta Smith
Friday, January, 5, 2017
Elizabeth Murray was a great painter who didn’t have a great late phase. One certainly seemed possible after her 2005 retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, but, sadly, she died of cancer in 2007 at the age of 66.
So it’s not surprising that the excellent if slightly random survey of Murray’s drawings at the gallery Canada, on the Lower East Side, has a bittersweet, if-only undercurrent. It confirms the love of drawing and all its sundry instruments — from traditional pastel to ballpoint pen — at the heart of Murray’s art. “Everything comes from drawing out my ideas,” she once said. The high quality, diversity and incessant energy of these works also suggest how much more Murray might have accomplished. READ FULL REVIEW