Catherine Murphy is one in every of a handful of artists who modified observational portray between the Sixties and ’80s, when portray’s dominance was being contested. Murphy, together with Lois Dodd, Sylvia Plimack Mangold, and others, realized from abstraction and located a method to broaden the parameters of observational portray, overturn assumptions concerning the connection of two- to three-dimensionality, construct upon predecessors’ improvements in composition, and pursue preoccupations with unlikely subject material.
Well-known for portray at a gradual tempo, a Murphy exhibition is an occasion. Her dedication to Heraclitean statement signifies that you can’t step in the identical river twice — she doesn’t work in collection, and her drawings and work kind two discrete our bodies of labor inside her oeuvre.
The 9 oil work and eight graphite drawings that comprise Catherine Murphy: Current Work at Peter Freeman, Inc. are all in numerous sizes, reflecting the vary of her apply. This element is most obvious in 4 drawings (all 2024) depicting the again of a lady’s head, generally wrapped in a kerchief.
Catherine Murphy, “Ships” (2024), graphite on paper
Regardless of the similarity of the topic, each bit is a definite dimension and form based mostly on the composition. Likewise, every scarf is patterned in another way, as indicated by the titles — “Plaid,” “Ships,” “Leopard Skin,” and “Scalloped” — and each topic wears it in a singular means. The longer we have a look at the drawings, the extra dissimilar they seem, and, extra importantly, the extra customized the connection between the wearer and the headscarf turns into, though we by no means see anybody’s face.
These drawings aren’t about vogue. The kerchiefs’ apparently cheap supplies and acquainted patterns and pictures counsel a need for working- and middle-class folks to precise their individuality. That is the quietly radical present working via Murphy’s work: She has neither forgotten her working-class background nor made her private expertise the topic of her artwork. Her celebration of the fantastic thing about the on a regular basis is one other high quality her artwork shares with that of Dodd and Plimack Mangold. (An exhibition of their work, in addition to the legions of artists they’ve influenced, is lengthy overdue.)
Catherine Murphy, “Under the Table” (2022), oil on canvas
“No ideas but things,” the poet William Carlos Williams famously mentioned, emphasizing the significance of the concrete over concept. Murphy at all times locations the viewer in a selected bodily and visible relationship to the scene. In “Under the Table” (2022), we’re trying up on the underside of a spherical crimson desk, the place 4 folks sit with white linen napkins on their laps. Her capability to convey varied textures transports the portray right into a realm the place the tactile and the optical have change into inseparable.
In “Under the Table,” the perspective appears to be that of a small toddler standing proper subsequent to the desk. Not one of the adults are listening to the viewer, who shouldn’t be fairly a voyeur — a voyeur doesn’t want to be found. Set in opposition to the room’s crimson partitions, the view slowly reveals itself. Murphy makes us look and look once more with out explaining what we’re seeing, and implicates us within the scene; that is her genius. Her formal mastery is devoted to creating the odd inexplicable, inflicting us to look inward and replicate upon what we’re seeing.
She is especially attuned to how seeing is haunted by an consciousness of mortality. In “Bed Clothes” (2023), a crimson shirt, patterned skirt, and yellow socks are casually laid out on a mattress, as if that they had been organized within the type of an absent physique. Absence can also be felt in “Double Bed” (2022), identically sized pendant work separated by two inches, depicting two pillows piled on a mattress, every indented the place a head as soon as lay. The work dropped at thoughts the final line of John Berryman’s poem “Dream Song 1”: “and empty grows every bed.”
Catherine Murphy, “Still Living” (2024), oil on canvas
“Harry’s Office” (2023) is a cropped, close-up view of cabinets filled with papers and packages. The workplace belongs to Murphy’s husband, Harry Roseman. We look like bent over or seated on the desk in search of one thing. As calm, simple, detailed, and tender because the portray is, it’s underscored by an unknown sense of urgency. The palette of yellows, browns, beiges, and tans, accented with inexperienced and crimson, could replicate the precise workplace, however it evokes late afternoon, time passing, and the disordered remnants and information inevitably left behind.
“Still Living” (2024) brings the viewer nose to nose with a gaping gash in a tree trunk. Murphy’s meticulous consideration to small, discrete sections of the tree goes in opposition to generalization and painterly shorthand, and causes our consideration to refocus continually — from trying on the multi-sectioned, blocky bark, we would zero in on the striated inside. From the leaves of the bushes to the blasted trunk, she strikes part to part, and hue to hue. The buildup of particulars, and the taut stability she maintains between every leaf and your entire view, is astonishing, majestic, and unsettling. Because the portray’s title tells us, we’re trying into an uncovered wound of a “still living” organism. Like the opposite works we encounter on this deeply absorbing exhibition, we should be alive, however the irrefutable proof of our absence is in all places.
Catherine Murphy, “Leopard Skin” (2024), graphite on paper
Catherine Murphy: Current Work continues at Peter Freeman, Inc. (140 Grand Road, Decrease East Aspect, Manhattan) via April 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
