Elizabeth Murray

The Elizabeth Murray exhibition at Skidmore Gallery boasts some of the artist's most unique works. Murray came to ULAE in 1986 and began working in lithography. In Blue Body, 1986-87, Murray confronts the complexities of the medium. She expands the scale of the table and guitar, which consume much of the sheet, and works on both plates and stones, building up the density of color and illusion of texture. When considered in sequence, Murray's prints reveal her desire to surpass previous accomplishments, to bring something new to the process while integrating it with her painting and drawing. For Down Dog, 1988, Goldston and printer Brintzenhofe devised a way to paint from several matrices, hand-tearing, and reassembling the prints using tabs.

Murray's return to pure lithography in the early 1990's came with an intensity and excitement as her prints joined her paintings and entered the third dimension. Shoe String, 1993, was made from thirty-six aluminum plates and has twenty-one colors, a palette of hand-torn sheets of paper linked by a string woven through the elements. Murray's next print Shack, 1994, combines techniques of Shoe String and the earlier dog prints, incorporating separate sheets of paper and three dimensional qualities.