Elizabeth Murray at PaceWildenstein

Never one to rest on her laurels, Elizabeth Murray followed last year's MOMA retrospective with an ebullient and celebratory exhibition of paintings and works on paper. The hallmarks of Murray's work have always been fluidity and hybridity--she presents a universe in which everything is on the verge of morphing into something else. Her bold, interwoven compositions make no distinction between animate and inanimate objects because it appears that at any moment one can grow into the other. Instead, she presents a state of shifting but conserved energy that blends the absurdity of Dr. Seuss, the organicism of Miro, the exuberance of Keith Haring and most of all the improvisation of jazz.

While the recent works contain many of Murray's trademark references to the domestic world of mutating coffee cups and recombinatory furniture, this exhibition was also particularly full of references to music. One work, titled Flight of the Bumble Bee (2003) after the frenetic orchestral interlude written by Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, presents a jittery collection of discrete and possibly recognizable forms (one can make out a pair of windows or perhaps wrapped packages, dog bones and a bowtie) that seem to be vibrating individually as they lightly brush up against each other.

Even more explicitly musical, Muddy Waters 8:05 A.M. (2003-04) mingles references to everyday life with aural symbols. Sound waves seem to ripple like a river in a ribbon of undulating blue/green, and sound made visual blasts out of a blue horn in tongues of flame. Elements weave in and out of each other, meandering across the wall and creating a web of semi-abstract forms that encompass hands, hats, a keyboard and possibly a cup of coffee. Music also dominates Do the Dance (2005), which almost seems like a dance diagram, and Ai Yi Yi (2006), in which a stick-figure performer and a horn twisted like a tangle of string are caught between strips of musical notations.

The exhibition also included a set of gouache and watercolor drawings that are even looser, if that is possible, than the paintings. Full of crosshatching, rudimentary, cartoonish figures, skewed letters and interlocked geometric forms created from overlays of collaged bits of paper, they bring out Murray's connections to graffiti and cartoons even more explicitly, while bringing to mind the soaring freedom of the late Matisse cutouts.

The wonder of Murray's work is its continuing inventiveness. Forms collide, shatter and reassemble to present a world in which chaos is the necessary prelude to creation.

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