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Paintings shaped by woman's view

[[image - photograph]]
"My Own Eyes"
by Elizabeth Murray.

BY MARSHA MIRO
Free Press Art Critic

Elizabeth Murray's paintings are saturated and driven by a female point of view. That is one reason her spectacular and inventive works, at Birmingham's Susanne Hilberry Gallery, are so satisfying.

"My Own Eyes" provides the clearest example. But, as with all of Murray's work, it takes time to sort out what you see.

"Eyes" is a metaphor for nurturing life, an illustration, a demonstration. This is felt, sensed, seen and projected in the configuration of its elements.

And only a woman could know this, as Murray does. Only a female could tell it this way.

On first reading, "Eyes," a 7-foot, olive green, shaped canvas protruding from the wall, looks to be a labyrinth game. Then it reveals itself as a body part, perhaps a head? No, a headless torso.

There are two cartoony handlebar bosoms, a giant navel hole that leads inside the body and a very fleshy pink slit at the bottom.

This is a woman's torso. A

See MIRO, Page 6D



Paintings shaped by a woman’s perspective 

MIRO, from Page 1D

painted blue umbilical cord with a sperm-like arrow head enters at the top of the painting, dips into the labyrinth and eventually resurfaces at the bottom.

Becoming a mother, being a mother, then letting go - all this is here. The questions, emotions, notions and intuitions involved in the maze of motherhood are all reflected in "My Own Eyes." The navel, for instance, is a space that telescopes so deep into the painting it seems to reach to the bare soul links of mother to unborn child.

Even the physical structure of this shaped painting takes on the presence of a bulging body. A narrative is painted on the canvas, eliciting ideas and feelings. The illusions of the painting get reinforced by the real dimensions of the sculpture.

In her works in the show, Murray paints love, longing and aging, states that are emotional and shared by male and female. Her paintings, layered and complex, do not pin these feelings down. Rather her paintings keep these emotions alive, funny, fragile and open to anyone.

New Yorker Murray, 51, has a son in college and two daughters in elementary school. Since the early '80s, she has been painting images from and about her life - things like a cracked coffee cup, dreams of living in the country, dresses pinned to the grass. Murray adds a whole new level of image-making to that genre.

Before these works, she was known for her paintings of color-laden biomorphic and geometric forms. The simple forms played tug-of-war and threatened to push out of their rectilinear canvases. Although satisfying, they were groundwork for the shaped image paintings that followed. These shaped paintings have brought Murray fame and major exhibitions at museums such as the Whitney in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Dallas Museum of Art. She is one of a handful of women artists acknowledged as important by the art establishment.

Murray was born in Chicago, grew up in the Midwest and earned a bachelor's degree from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1962. The art world there was dominated by a group of Chicago artists who proved with their paintings that cartoons could be fine art. They had a kind of outsider freshness that Murray keeps alive in her cartoon-like images.

"I want my paintings to be like wild things that just burst out of the zoo," Murray told the New York Times.

As female as Murray's paintings are, they evolve from classic modern art male roots. She keeps a postcard of Cezanne's painting of his wife on her studio wall. Cezanne's structures of objects in space. Picasso's perspective-less cubism, Miro's biomorphic folk creatures, Pollock's overall topographies of paint - are all strands that inform her work.

She becomes, in a way, a successor to Frank Stella, and his shaped paintings. But Murray's paintings occupy a space between pure painting and pure sculpture, very different from Stella.

Murray draws her relief shapes first, then models them in clay. That is crucial. Her shapes have a plasticity that comes from modeling.

Her assistants build the shaped structure of wood. Then the canvas is anchored like a rubber sheet over the stretcher.

While this is all planned, the painting on the canvas isn't. Things surface and change as images take shape.

The works aren't perfectly crafted either. Nails are visible. Undersides can be seen. Murray builds up layers of rich, thick color in some parts, then lets the drips, the underneath layers show at the edges. This reveals the process of making these paintings. It also reinforces the fact that these are made-up images, poetic visions and wondrous, incredible works of art.

The exhibit continues through April 2 at the Susanne Hilberry Gallery, 555 N. Woodward, Birmingham. Gallery hours are 11-6 Tue.-Sat. Murray and New York art critic Jerry Saltz will talk about her work 11 a.m. Sat. at Wayne State University in the Community Arts Auditorium on Cass Ave. For more information call 642-8250 during gallery hours.
 

DETROIT FREE PRESS/FRIDAY, MARCH 4, 1994