Elizabeth Murray

Art Brokerage: Elizabeth Murray American Artist. b. 1940-2007. Motion is the subject of Elizabeth Murray's art. Pressure, pushing, and pulling are words frequently used to describe inner struggle as well as the relationship between internal elements and external boundaries. Using domestic objects to create environments of motion, she creates chaotic abstract combinations in which jumbled chairs, shoes, cups, and tables interact in space evoking a feeling of domestic tension. The subject of her work exposes her female experience and perspective, yet Murray insists that the primacy of her work is formal. Here, Murray's emotional projection onto the cup, and the cup's taking on its own emotional life are set in a context of Murray's intellectual concerns: the formal challenge of allowing the structure of the cup to remain fragmented while it defines the table and the room. Elizabeth Murray has built larger and more complicated shaped surfaces, on and into which she devises illusion and deconstructs objects, the tension between inner and outer worlds extends beyond Murray, into the viewer's world: "the viewer is required to reconcile physical and visual forms with narrative." It is through this interplay of the internal and external, and their ambiguous boundaries, that tension seeks release. The resulting pushing and pulling thus creates a visual perpetual motion between the images, the surfaces, the objects, and the mysteries of Elizabeth Murray's work. The relationship between the internal and exterior worlds is always left a bit uncertain as to the dialog between the form, the meaning, and the boundaries of each. Elizabeth Murray acknowledges the significant influence of comics in her work, which most often comments not on popular issues, but personal events. At the same time her cartoon-like forms connect her to 60's Pop icon status. Listings wanted.