Curated by Robert Storr
Updating her 1987–88 traveling retrospective, MoMA’s survey of seventy-odd paintings and drawings spanning four decades is a tribute to Elizabeth Murray’s eccentric presence in today’s art world. With a funk sensibility that connects her to the indigenous art of her native Chicago, as well as to Guston and Crumb, she has created her own, Pop-inspired universe swarming with forms resembling Mickey Mouse ears, Dagwood shoes, thought balloons, and domestic objects that morph into illegibility. But her work has equally strong parallels to the story of abstraction, often echoing de Kooning’s restless collisions and Stella’s shaped explosions as she continues to invent baroque extravagances of clashing shapes and eye-popping colors, all squirming in low relief.
