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• Elizabeth Murray was born in Chicago in 1940 and died of lung cancer at age 66 on August 12, 2007

• She was born to a working-class family that struggled to make ends meet.

• Her interest in art started at a young age and she drew constantly.

Paul Cezanne, Still Life With a Basket of Apples, 1893

Large Still Life with a Pedestal Table, Pablo Picasso, 1931

The Persistence of Time, Salvador Dali

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• Cubists rejected the idea that art should copy nature and refused to adopt the traditional techniques of perspective, modeling and foreshortening used to create realistic imagery.

• The Spanish artist Pablo Picasso and the French artist Georges Braque initiated the movement,between 1907 and 1914.

• They wanted instead to emphasize the two-dimensionality of the canvas. So they reduced and fractured objects into geometric forms, and then reassembled these within a shallow picture space so that they appeared to be seen from many angles at once.

• Other cubists:

Tristan Tzara, Paul Eluard, Andre Breton, Hans Arp, Salvador Dali, Yves Tanguy, Max Ernst, Rene Crevel, Man Ray, Paris, 1933

• The Surrealist movement began in Paris in 1924 • A small group of writers and artists, influenced by the work of Sigmund Freud, began looking

at the power of the unconscious mind as a means to unlock the imagination. • In 1924, French writer André Breton, the leader of the movement, wrote Le Manifeste du

Surréalisme. In it, he defined Surrealism as:

SURREALISM, n. Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to expressverbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner—the actual functioning ofthought. Dictated by thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason exempt fromany aesthetic or moral concern.

• They were interested in the involvement of the unconscious mind in chance occurrences and dream imagery

• Murray was a crucial figure in the struggle to bring painting back to life in the 1970s and early '80s.

• In her work, she moved away from the traditional rectangular canvas format, breaking with the art-historical convention of illusionistic space in a two-dimensional picture-plane…

• …. blurring the line between the painting as an object and the painting as a space for depicting objects.

• She began to create supports in the wild biomorphic and geometric shapes as well as shapes almost recognizable as domestic objects (tables, cups, chairs, etc.)….

• She would fit these together like a colorful, abstract puzzle.

• Her artworks are huge, wall sized pieces. Often, many different shaped canvases were fit together for the overall painting

• The images were defined by layers of bold colors.• She describes her work as an exploration of emotions and the psyche.

“For a couple of years I’ve been working with cutting out shapes and kind of glomming them together and letting it go where it may, like basically making a zigzag shape and making a rectangular shape and a circular, bloopy, fat, cloudy shape and just putting them all together and letting the cards fall where they may. I don’t know why I’m doing it this way because what I want more than anything else in my life and in my painting is for things to unify, to come together.”

Painter's Progress (1981).

Almost Made It. 1998-1999Oil on three canvases, 73 1/2 x 99”

Landing, 1999

“It is about making things, and it’s about expression, and it’s about creation.”

“When you walk out of the studio, and you walk down the street that’s where you find art. Or you find it at home, right in front of you. I paint about things that surround me-things that I pick up and handle everyday. That’s what art is. Art is an epiphany in a coffee cup.”

Yikes, 1982. Oil on canvas, two panels, 9' 7" x 9' 5

Bop. 2002-2003. Oil on canvas 9’10” x 10’10.5”

Can You Hear Me?1984Oil on 4 canvases106 x 159 x 12 in.

Worms eye. 2002. Oil on canvas, 97” X 92”