Chaotic Lip, Elizabeth Murray

Archive Label: Elizabeth Murray has explored the formal expressive potentials of painting for nearly three decades, at a time when traditional distinctions between painting and sculpture were being questioned by American artists. Chaotic Lip shows Murray’s fascination with such contradictions. The work contains a tension between the spatial illusionism of painting and the three-dimensionality of relief sculpture, as it twists and pulls away form the wall. It may be difficult for the viewer to decide whether the piece is painted sculpture or a sculpted painting. Murray’s art is not “pretty” or easy to like. She deliberately chooses muddy, raw colors, a tripped oddly distorted shaped canvas, and a crudely half-painted style to present her strange, biomorphic images, which seem to be derived from both dreams and comic books. Murray began her career studying commercial illustration and cartooning and cone can see this playful aspect in her work. She loves the way the exaggerated gestures of figures in cartoons zoom in and out of space, and she uses some of those effects in this piece. An exaggerated pair of lips appears in the upper part and as a cut-out on a square in the center of the work. Four similar squares rush outward in comic-book fashion on each of the four corners of the “painting.” Murray also tries to convey a sense of spontaneity and process - the chaos of creation - in this piece by leaving staples, frayed edges, and unpainted areas of canvas exposed as if the work were unfinished.