04/24/2026
Rebecca Camacho Presents is thrilled to highlight celebrated artist Elizabeth Murray (b. 1940 Chicago, IL, d. 2007, Granville, NY) in ‘Assistants,’ on view through 25 April.
Murray was an artist at the forefront of American painting for five decades and is considered one of the most important postmodern abstract artists of her time. Her drive and determination produced a singularly innovative body of work characterized by a Cubist-informed Minimalism and streetwise Surrealism.
Throughout her career, she reveled in the physicality of paint and approached her work through the constructive vocabulary of sculpture, warping, twisting, splintering, and knotting her canvases.
Within Murray’s legacy as an inventive painter, drawing played a critical role; providing insight into her drive to blur traditional distinctions between abstraction and figuration in order to make work that was both intimate and formally muscular.
Unencumbered by the demands of large-scale painting, Murray found, through drawing, an explosive freedom in mark-making that also served as a quick way to work through compositional problems before beginning her complex paintings. Murray’s drawings serve as both studies for paintings and standalone works, capturing the gradual emergence of images
and ideas from initial sketches to polished pictorial illusions, reflecting her unwavering experimentation and dissatisfaction with pat or pre-determined solutions.
Elizabeth Murray’s work can be found in over ninety public collections in North America, Asia, and Europe.
1. Untitled (study for painting), 2000. Marker and colored pencil with collage on paper. 18 3/8 x 11 7/8 x 1 3/8 inches, framed.
2. Study for “Bop”, 2002. Colored pencil and pencil on paper. 14 5/8 x 13 1/2 x 1 1/2 inches, framed.
3. Untitled, 2004. Felt tipped pen on paper. 12 7/8 x 15 3/4 x 1 3/8 inches, framed.
4. Drawing for Benefit Print Portfolio: Doctor’s of the World, 2000. Marker, felt tipped pen and gouache on paper. 11 3/4 x 14 5/8 x 1 3/8 inches, framed.
5. Dreams, 2004. Marker, colored pencil, felt tipped pen, and watercolor with collage on paper. 13 x 13 3/4 x 1 3/8 inches, framed.
