POUGHKEEPSIE, N.Y. — I first encountered Catherine Murphy’s work at the now-closed Xavier Fourcade gallery on Manhattan’s Upper East Side in 1980, and I have admired it ever since. Her career took off when her paintings were included in the 1972 Annual Exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art, a predecessor to the Biennial. Since then, Murphy has described herself as an “observational painter” working from what she sees.
Over time, though, she moved beyond direct observation, creating situations shaped by dreams and memory and expanding both the idea of realism and the realist tradition of painting at a one-to-one scale. With those two shifts, Murphy pushed observational painting into territory that is distinctly her own. Like Alex Katz, whose work she saw as a student, she wanted to make large paintings that could stand beside the Abstract Expressionists while also rejecting style and serial production.
I have written about Murphy many times, including in the only monograph devoted to her paintings and drawings, yet I still find the richness and perceptual intricacy of her work deeply formidable. Whether I am looking at two clear plastic bags stuffed with used clothes and piled on a broken office chair, stacks of yellowed books seen from the side, or a wallpapered room corner with baseboard and red wall-to-wall carpet, I feel I am only beginning to understand what is there. For a long time I concentrated on her attention to detail within the broader image, but I have recently come to see that I had overlooked the structure of the paintings, and that the tension between the whole and its parts is another of Murphy’s important innovations.
What I am suggesting is that after breaking with the conventions of realism, Murphy realized her ambitions were even larger than her achievements. To keep advancing, she had to take on the modernist rules governing abstraction, including the grid and the two-dimensional picture plane. Could those be reconciled with one-point perspective while becoming something new? In short, Murphy wanted to have her cake and eat it too. That meant continuing along a path that was entirely her own, even as it raised pictorial problems few of her contemporaries were willing to address.
Murphy is a subversive painter whose work is in conversation with Renaissance artists and classical subjects such as the nude, as well as with her contemporaries and predecessors, including Lois Dodd and Robert Mangold. Rather than embrace the postmodern belief that everything is rubble or that progress is a dead utopian ideal, she rejected the now-familiar tactics of parody, citation, and irony. She was not interested in mocking high modernist devices; instead, she used modernist compositional strategies such as the grid to transform the ordinary into the unexpected. By making realism, or the three-dimensional, inseparable from modernism, or the two-dimensional plane, she could shape and honor the passage of time without seeking refuge from inevitable destruction, a lifelong concern that makes her paintings so compelling. Faced with her meticulously ordered arrangements of revealing details, both separated and linked, we recognize something of ourselves in them: mortality and solitude.
