Review (via Brooklyn Rail): Elizabeth Murray in Buffalo and for the ages

Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town, 2021 installation view, University at Buffalo Art Galleries. Photo: Nando Alvarez-Perez.

Originally published by The Brooklyn Rail
By Dana Tyrrell

From 1965 to 1967, Elizabeth Murray – a towering presence in contemporary painting who died in 2007 – lived and worked in Buffalo, New York. Having moved from San Francisco to teach at Rosary Hill College (now Daemen College), she used her time in Buffalo to build up to living and working in New York City. “Elizabeth Murray: Back In Town,” Anderson Gallery at the University at Buffalo, demonstrated that this interlude was formative to the canonically understood Elizabeth Murray. Beyond that, the show constituted a museum-class survey of the artist’s work as a whole – the first since the Museum of Modern Art’s 2005 retrospective, only the fifth one that the institution afforded a woman.

The exhibition opened with work Murray made in the years preceding Buffalo: small, dense pictures, bandaged with brushstrokes and alive with the influence of contemporaries like Jasper Johns. NH Lockwood (1964) forecasts the path of Murray’s mature painting practice. One of the smallest works in the exhibition, the square, green canvas depicts a genderless face applying lipstick in a mirror. The act seems like a struggle. The bulbous face and head strain the mirror’s frame, while a hand reaches from the lower left aspect, grasping lipstick but never quite making contact with the gravelly lips, as a naked lightbulb swings above.

Like other early Murray works, NH Lockwood gingerly challenges the conventionally static, flat surface of a painting. Bulging outward at the nostrils, the painting steps towards three-dimensionality. The reaching arm and hand are somewhere between brush mark and assemblage. It is a quieter painting than what Murray is best known for, but it is also a clear and important precursor of that work.

The exhibition was expansive, plotting Murray’s career piece by piece across the first and second floors of the gallery. The 70-plus works included her signature curved canvases and multi-panel paintings, drawings, works on paper, and 3-D lithograph constructions. They show that her capabilities, though focused on painting, were not limited to one medium, and that she generated works of increasing audacity and originality. As the works and artist mature, the remnants of Abstract Expressionism, proto-Pop, and West Coast Funk begin to fall away.