Murray reflects on distinguished career as an artist

The loud and astronomically sized paintings now on view at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) are an unfathomable feat when you see the small frame of their creator, Elizabeth Murray. The artist, a diminutive woman, gives little indication that she could have created such arresting works. Yet when she spoke recently at the Crossroads Theater at Rutgers, Murray's brilliant synthesis of her works, as well as her refusal to romanticize her process or her craft, proved that she could indeed bear such art.

The placement of Murray's exhibit on the sixth floor gallery — the top floor — of MoMA feels particularly apt. Murray's work is described in the accompanying exhibit guide as taking in the influence of minimalist abstraction and surrealism, incorporating a "broad field of activity" and ultimately creating a "new opportunity for painting." Thus, sitting on top of the Museum's vast collection, Murray's work feels like the culmination of the various paths and forms of modern art that MoMA houses.

Murray's retrospective pieces together the myriad styles she flirted with throughout her career, and her body of work takes us from the past and into the present.

The first room of the exhibition includes works that pay homage to Murray's predecessors and influences. In each of these works, however, Murray's own touch is evident.

At times she conflates different movements in one piece. In "A mirror," Murray paints a surrealist subject in a cubist milieu: Murray fragments her pictorial plane, using a piece of glass and placing a wooden frame on her painting like a collage. She writes "A Mirror" on the bottom of her painting, as if directly referencing the work of Braque and Picasso. However, the mirror as subject and the reference to the eye intimate a surrealist influence.

Murray explained that she alluded to these different movements because when she entered the art scene she "wanted to be a part of things" and "have people look at [her] work." This desire was not a narcissistic urge, but an inner drive. Murray noted that she used her grid paintings, works that at first glance seem incongruous in her exhibit, as a way to break in. Abstract minimalism was in vogue when Murray's career began and she longed to "find a way to really fit in that was [hers]."

As we turn the corner in the exhibit we move from Murray's cubist, surrealist and minimalist works to paintings that move Murray completely into a place of her own. Abandoning the small, intimate scale of her earlier works, Murray shifts to enormous canvases on which everything — color, size and intensity — is amplified. She credits this change not only to moving to a larger studio and moving back to New York from California, but also to a newfound exuberance now expressed in her work.

These paintings are geometric, fluid, large but simple, using just a few colors. Though they are enormous, we feel as though Murray needs more space and wants to break free of the boundaries of her canvas. She seems unsatisfied, almost looking for something else, something more.

Murray begins to satisfy this need by using the canvas not just as the receptacle for paint but as a tool itself. She creates shapes with her canvas and uses it as a means of expression. Her "Heart and Mind" expresses the tension between the heart and the mind, they way they reject and yearn towards each other, not only through use of the paints' color and shape, but also by the shapes the canvas is cut into and placed on the wall. Here, Murray's belief that in art "color and form arc and meet each other" is perfectly exemplified.

Her disjointed jigsaw-like cut canvases are placed on the wall to form a single design, as if Murray had cut up one of her large canvases. However, Murray calls it "Painter's Progress," perhaps suggesting that she sees a finished piece of work like a completed puzzle and works on the smaller pieces first, or perhaps indicating that as she begins to use the canvas as a material itself she moves forward in her art.

In the next room, Murray continues pulling apart her canvas, overlapping canvases, until at last — as if unable to contain herself on the flat surface — Murray bursts and produces complete three-dimensional sculpture-like surfaces, monsters that break free of the boundaries of conventional painting.

This seems to be the cathartic moment of Murray's exhibit. She uses colors and shapes that are imposing and shocking and invade the viewer's space. They are massive forms that seem almost human. When asked if she ever feels crowded by these enormous forms, Murray answered "yes" and described this as "the most exciting part," that she gets to "create bodies."

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Murray uses color that is cheerful and bright alongside to color that is somber and disturbing. She explained that there is "no dictate" to what a certain color might suggest, but that "color is emotion." Murray waxed poetic on the power of color, explaining that it "is physical. It catches the light and send it back out. It is wordless. It is meaningful but has no name." Thus Murray might use blue to suggest "despair" and "discomfort, sorrow and grief" in one place, and use it to suggest "sky" elsewhere. She believes color is the "psychological center" of a painting and she will "exploit it to provoke" the viewer.

Murray's painting seems calmer by the end of her exhibit. Her cut out pieces of canvas are now fitted together, restricted to a kind of frame, as in her "Do the Dance". They are neatly packaged, bold and beautiful, created out of bright colors and a fragmented canvas, yet unobtrusive.

While this retrospective pays homage to a constant innovator, Murray worries about what she will do next. "Will it be good, interesting, can I get past what I've done before," she wondered, hoping not to suffer the fate of Pollack, whose final works in his retrospective led Murray to think, "what a poor guy." Judging by Murray's past mutations and reconfigurations, it is hard to fathom such a fate for her career.

"Elizabeth Murray," a retrospective, is on view at the Museum of Modern Art in New York until Jan. 9.