Included in the exhibition will be examples of bodies of work dating from Elizabeth Murray's first Gemini project, published in 1993, through her last, published in 2006.
Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago in 1940 and resided in New York for much of her career, until her untimely passing in 2007. Murray’s art is serious but has whimsy; it is personally domestic yet open to broader interpretations. Many of her highly inventive paintings border on sculptures, in that they were often constructed of canvas stretched over bulging wooden forms. Her printmaking endeavors closely followed this same direction; of the 39 series or editions Murray created at Gemini, 13 are 3‐dimensional. Murray whirled into motion ordinary objects – shoes, cups, tables, dogs, and more – and brought them to the precipice of abstraction, creating a vocabulary of imagery distanced from the obvious yet sufficiently reigned in to be familiar.
Going beyond the ordinary print was Murray’s typical collaboration with the Gemini workshop. Her first project, a series of uniquely pastelled and collaged “prints” titled Thirty Eight, immediately set the tone for later collaborations, in which she would come to the workshop, use the printmaking facilities to create printed basics for her collages, and then spend her time at the shop cutting, collaging and coloring each individual work in the series. Even when she did create editioned prints, they were often significantly 3‐dimensional, as seen in works such as Body and Soul, Capree and Radish (all dating from 2001). Replete with vibrant colors and elaborately constructed imagery, Murray’s Gemini projects run the gambit – from sensitively rendered, intimate lithographs and etchings, to dramatic, bold, large‐scale expressive works. In Murray’s graphic oeuvre, there’s something for everyone.
