Awards
2006 Distinguished Artist Award for Lifetime Achievement
Elizabeth Murray
Elizabeth Murray (photograph provided by PaceWildenstein Gallery)
The jury for 2006 honors the distinguished artist Elizabeth Murray for her lifetime of achievement. Through works that strikingly endow the familiar with unexpected forms, Murray has revitalized the tradition of painting and contributed a major original vision to contemporary art.
Murray has exhibited widely in New York and nationally, from her first exhibitions at the Paula Cooper Gallery in the 1970s to her recent retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Her work is included in the collection of MoMA as well as in those of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden of the Smithsonian Institution, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among others. She is the recipient of many awards, including a prestigious MacArthur Foundation fellowship.
By combining California Funk with New York Minimalism in her works of the 1970s, Murray revivified an abstract painting that had become formulaic; she also brought fresh energy to the cool irony of Pop. As Louise Hamlin wrote in her letter of nomination, “She has changed both the face of painting and the understanding of it, for the general public and artists alike.” Her early images of the Empire State Building, with their offhand appropriation of New York’s most potent masculine icon, exemplify her humor as well as the self-assurance that inspired her to warp the conventions of geometric abstraction. Minimalism encouraged Murray to focus on simple structures, on the painting as object, often involving deviations from symmetry, in ways that lend her work formal complexity. By applying these structures to domestic objects, she endows them with psychological urgency and vernacular poetry. While she has engaged objects directly through their fragmentation and reassembly on shaped canvases and through three-dimensional modeling, her recent works distill and sublimate these experiences into freely drawn compositions that pulse with luminous energy.
Elizabeth Murray, The Sun and the Moon, 2005, oil on canvas on wood, 117 x 107½ in. (artwork © Elizabeth Murray; photograph provided by PaceWildenstein Gallery)
Murray has often been a mentor to younger artists; her generosity has manifested itself most notably in her recent return to teaching at Brooklyn College. Perhaps more significant, though, has been her inspirational role, particularly for women artists but also more widely, for the unpretentious pleasure with which she responds to painting. In the spirit of the popular imagery she often appropriates, her stance is down-to-earth, open, and inclusive.
Many artists have delved into popular culture in efforts to bridge the gap between high and low art, but few if any have succeeded as Murray has in maintaining both the vitality of the one and the sophistication and psychological complexity of the other. She taps deeply into the sources of modernism and the energy of American everyday life. Just as her subjects mutate and adopt shifting references, her influence promises to take unexpected and various turns. What is certain is that her paintings and the example of her career will continue to bring joy and inspiration to future generations of artists and viewers.
Jury: Hearne Pardee, University of California, Davis, chair; Georgia Strange, Indiana University; Leo Morrissey, Winston Salem State University; and Robert Berlind, Purchase College, State University of New York.
