Mixing it …
Elizabeth Murray’s genre-bending 1998 painting fused abstraction and pop, while drawing on everything from cubism to surrealism, the comic books she religiously read and drew as a kid in Chicago, and the graffiti she saw plastered across the walls of 70s and 80s New York.
Pull shapes …
Ultimately, what Murray came up with in her four-decade career was very much her own. Most striking are the crazy-shaped canvases, which might be overlain or turn fully 3D, pushing painting’s status as both image and object by swooshing off the walls.
Home work …
Her paintings are far from purely abstract. She liked the symbols of comics and writing, including speech bubbles and letters, but drew equally on the stuff of her life as an artist, wife and mum. Coffee cups are a recurring motif, as are cartoonish shapes suggesting bodies.
The great escape …
In Maybe True it’s as if the splurge of egg-yolk yellow and the black spermy shapes are forcing themselves beyond painting’s traditional rectangular window, busting it open.
Included in Surface Work, Victoria Miro, N1 & W1, to 16 June
