Flesh, Earth and Sky

“Painting is an affirmation of life.”

Elizabeth Murray earned an MFA from the Art Institute of Chicago and was a native of that city. The bold colors and cartoon aesthetic of the Chicago Imagists informed her paintings of the late 1970s as much as New York abstraction did. The parallelogram shape of Flesh, Earth and Sky represents the beginning phase of Murray’s shaped canvases, which later developed into fractured canvases. She was enthused by the pictorial possibilities of alternatives to the rectangle. In 1991 The New York Times heralded Murray as “one of the most esteemed artists to have emerged in America in the past decade.” In 2005 she was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It affirmed that her paintings continued to reference, celebrate, and push the limits of the medium itself.