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Art
Elizabeth Murray

When

Sep 21, 2009 – Nov 20, 2009

Mondays–Fridays (11am–6pm)

Where
The Arts Club of Chicago (201 E Ontario St, 312.787.3997)
Price
FREE
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In the early '80s, Elizabeth Murray started "making paintings that would blow up into the space," a breakthrough she later recalled on the event of her 2005 MoMA retrospective. Murray's posthumous exhibition at the Arts Club (11 large paintings, 9 works on paper) shows her flexible pursuit of this direction over multiple decades. Irregularly shaped paintings with undulating surfaces gave way to electric colored conjunctions of elaborate pre-cut canvases — a ruckus of zig-zags and cartoonish biomorphs. Murray "picks up the loose pieces of Cubism and Surrealism," as Robert Storr notes, employing shattered perspectives and distorted domestic views. But above all, her paintings thrive on visual reversals, a sense of unity that sneaks up on you, and a push-and-pull between dimensionality and pictorial illusion.

Karsten Lund