Artist in Focus: Judith Murray

Like many people, our office is inundated with junk mail---Flyers, Post Cards, Offer letters and the like. For the most part I try to give everything a cursory glance before filing it away in the Deep 6 because every so often I find a gem. Most recently it was a post card from the Sundaram Tagore Gallery here in Beverly Hills.



Their latest exhibition is called Continuum by Judith Murray and I was immediately taken by this woman's nonconformist paintings. She has created a trademark of her own language of effusion and sensation created through the use of heavy texture in a limited palette of red, yellow, white and black. Each work is composed in the moment, as Murray responds to the results of her previous strokes. A bar of color grounds the compositions on the left hand side, providing a barrier of linear energy to these otherwise untamed depictions of vitality within the expansive bounds of her large works (as you can see in the photo of Judith painting in her studio)



Murray was commissioned by the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts to create a poster for the Mostly Mozart Festival in 1981, 1986, and 1991. Her work is included in the permanent collections of Honolulu Academy of Art, Honolulu, Hawaii; the National Museum of Art, Warsaw, Poland; and the Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York. In 2002 she was named the Guggenheim Fellow.

I look forward to the gallery opening party and to meeting this brilliant artist of our time in person.