Link to Post:
http://www.gorkysgranddaughter.com/2013/04/catherine-murphy-at-peter-freeman-inc.html
Christopher Joy and Zachary Keeting talk with Catherine Murphy about the work in her exhibition Catherine Murphy: Recent Work at Peter Freeman, Inc., New York, on view through April 27, 2013.
Murphy discusses her process and how she came to care "about the whole surface." She explains: "It's a kind of way of seeing that I linger, I linger, I linger, I linger, so that makes… a flat painting. If you don't decide you're going to focus your attention in one place, you're going to end up making a painting that's flat." She continues: "So I think my paintings are flat… even though there's this detail, there's an equal detail throughout the whole painting. That's always what interested me, even when I was a very young painter… I decided if I was going to talk about paintings in which you were seeing reality… talk about the act of observation, I had to get closer to how I observed rather than just use as a model how everyone else observed. In so doing I realized that there's two things, there's what I'm looking at and there's this rectangle and they have to come into harmony…"
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/67886/catherine-murphys-challenge/
John Yau blogs about the work of Catherine Murphy, on view at Peter Freeman, Inc., New York thorugh April 27, 2013.
Yau writes: "Murphy doesn’t generalize, doesn’t develop shorthand for her subjects, doesn’t use paint in any way that announces painterliness or style. Rather, she does something far more difficult and demanding — she remains devoted to her subject, however plain and ordinary. And if the subject requires that Murphy paint layers of flesh-colored tissue paper or flakes of falling snow seen through a window on a windy night, then she will take up the challenge. Think of all the artists who become content to produce examples of their brand with just the right little twist. There is none of that in this exhibition. Every painting and drawing is distinct, no variations."
Submitted by Brett Baker on December 13, 2012
Catherine Murphy, In the Grass, 2011, oil on canvas, 48 1/4 x 75 inches (Louis-Dreyfus Family Collection. Image courtesy of Peter Freeman Gallery, New York)
The exhibition Catherine Murphy: Falk Visiting Artist is on view at The Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina, through December 9, 2012.
In the video below, produced by the museum, Murphy comments on her desire to make paintings that function simultaneously as abstraction and representation:
"I really want to think about the painting as both an object - à la Robert Ryman, modernists, the minimalists - and a vehicle for information. I want to talk about the painting being able to simultaneously do both of those things, because our brains can do that, our brains can sustain both of those ideas... I'm not trying like a Renaissance artist to get you into the painting and make you thing that, in fact, it's reality. I'm trying to get you in the painting and remind you that it's a painting at the same time. I want to sustain this fiction... all the time."
Link to Post:
http://hyperallergic.com/60858/from-life-a-group-exhibition-organized-with-marshall-price-steven-harvey-fine-art-projects/
John Yau reviews the exhibition From Life at Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects, organized with Marshall Price, on view through December 23, 2012.
Yau writes that the show presents "11 paintings by artists committed to working from observation. Chronologically, the artists span five decades (or generations), with Lois Dodd and Lennart Anderson, born respectively in 1927 and 1928, being the oldest. The youngest include Gideon Bok, Anna Hostvedt, Sangram Majumdar and Cindy Tower, with Bok and Tower born in the 1960s, and Hostevedt and Majumdar born in the 1970s. The other artists are Susanna Coffey, Rackstraw Downes, Stanley Lewis, Catherine Murphy, and Sylvia Plimack Mangold, who were born between 1938 and 1949. Together, these artists — a number of whom have been influential teachers — suggest that observational painting is a vigorous, various, and imaginative enterprise that continues to fly under the radar."
