Elizabeth Murray

Elizabeth Murray was educated at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and Mills College in Oakland, California, where she received her MFA in 1964. In 1967 she moved to New York at a time when the art scene was dominated by Minimalism and Conceptualism. By 1971 Murray had abandoned her experiments with acrylics and object-making and returned to unfashionable oil paints despite the art- world dictum that "painting is dead." For the next decade, she moved from abstract forms to shapes that implied figures, and finally to canvases that were literally "taken apart" and reassembled to break down the conventional constraints of the picture plane. In the early 1980s Murray's innovative canvases began to move into three dimensions, as complex shapes in brilliant colors were overlaid to build reliefs. Murray, who lives in New York City, brings to her prints the same dynamic quality that can be seen in her paintings.

National Museum of American Art (CD-ROM) (New York and Washington D.C.: MacMillan Digital in cooperation with the National Museum of American Art, 1996)