Elizabeth Murray

An exhibition organised by the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York that will be held at the IVAM thanks to the Collaboration Agreement entered into by both institutions, whose objective is to show the work of this American artist, who has made a great impact with her vibrant colours and her abstract representation of everyday objects. During the nineteen seventies, Murray embarked upon a historiographic tour of concepts and artistic theories related with the treatment of forms, colour and volume within the field of abstraction. Murray melded her personal style with the knowledge and techniques picked up from her research into dynamic tensions related with Malevich’s geometrical configurations, the rhythmic use of colour in Mondrian’s geometrical figures, the weight and texture of Cézanne’s surfaces, the flight of planes of colour as a tool to produce vibration and facilitate the interpretation of certain forms and surfaces as figures and fields, directly taken from Matisse, and the paramount association of forms with certain colours proclaimed by Kandinsky. In the eighties she went one step further by using figurative motifs, which she disintegrated in an archipelago of “square-islands” that entered into conflict with the walls where they were hung, at the same time as she consolidated these motifs as unifying elements. Later Murray proceeded to create mural reliefs based on a jigsaw puzzle of everyday household objects as symbols of the psychological fragility in which we are immersed, associating them with certain colours and using a language based on comic books but manifested in a more elemental manner, thus shedding their narrative perception.