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Judith Murray at Sundaram Tagore - New York - exhibition of the artist's work
Art in America, Oct, 2003 by Michael Amy
Judith Murray's recent abstract works (oil on canvas, 1999 to 2003) speak of the pleasure of painting. She is deeply interested in mark-making. Her light, feathery brushstrokes are reminiscent of the ones used by Braque and Picasso to fill the edges and corners of their Analytic Cubist compositions, and can also be traced back to the work of Monet and Cezanne, in which each mark retains its integrity.
Murray's lyrical pictures are fraught with references to an earlier, distinctly French method of building up the surface. This slightly archaic quality goes a long way toward explaining their emotional charge. Murray is adept at achieving an osmotic relationship of sorts between geometric and painterly abstraction. Although the marks she makes with her brush or palette knife are rectangular in shape, their silhouettes are broken and their surfaces easily slip from opacity into transparency. All the paintings on display were characterized by a right vertical margin, incorporating a different range of hues and system of brushwork, and thus offering a critique of the larger composition unfolding on the left.
The Pleasures of Circulating (2000) is a lush, beautiful painting filled with flickering sensations of light and darkness. Its color scheme includes black, white, a variety of grays, yellow, beige, pink and red. Some of these hues reappear in the narrow right margin, which is more messily painted and in which orange plays a powerful role.
In Description Without Place (2000), Murray uses translucent red, black, white and yellowish glazes that run horizontally across the canvas and define a gamut of sheets of space. However, the brushstrokes are not always arranged at a right angle to the conspicuous, vertical right margin. In the large Abundance of Matter (2001), horizontal marks provide a staccato rhythm at the center of the painting. Beyond this dense field, the brushstrokes become longer and veer off to one side, creating impressions of birds in flight or of flowers bursting open, as larger gray and white washes fill the sides. This composition cascades from the top toward the lower right. Murray's paintings brim with light and color.
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