Catherine Murphy is one of a handful of artists who changed observational painting between the 1960s and 80s, when the dominance of painting was disputed. Murphy, together with Lois Dodd, Sylvia Plimack Mangold and others, learned from abstraction and found a way to expand the parameters of observational painting, assumptions to expand the relationship between two to three-dimensionality, building on the innovations of predecessors in composition and pre-loucupations.
Famous for painting at a slow pace, a Murphy exhibition is an event. Her dedication to Heraclitean observation means that you cannot step into the same river twice – she does not work in series, and her drawings and paintings form two discreet work bodies in her oeuvre.
The nine oil paintings and eight graphite drawings that include Catherine Murphy: Recent work At Peter Freeman, Inc. is all in different sizes, which reflects the reach of her practice. This detail is most clear in four drawings (all 2024) that display the back of a woman’s head, in most cases wrapped in a headscarf.
Despite the parable of the subject, each piece is a clear size and form based on the composition. Similarly, every scarf has formed differently, as indicated by the titles – “plaid”, “ships”, “leopard skin” and “sculpted” – and each topic carries it in a unique way. The longer we look at the drawings, the more unequal they seem, and, more importantly, the more personalized the relationship between the carrier and the scarf becomes, even though we never see anyone’s face.
These drawings are not about fashion. The seemingly cheap materials and well-known patterns and images of the Kerchiefs suggest a desire for work and middle class people to express their individuality. This is the quiet radical current that runs through Murphy’s work: she has not forgotten her background of the working class, nor her personal experience has made the subject of her art. Her celebration of the beauty of everyday life is another quality that shares her art with that of Dodd and Plimack Mangold. (An exhibition of their work, as well as the legions of artists they have influenced, has long been late.)
“No ideas but things,” said the poet William Carlos Williams famous, and emphasized the importance of concrete about theory. Murphy always places the viewer in a specific physical and visual relationship with the scene. In “Under the Table” (2022) we look up at the bottom of a round red table, where four people sit with white linen napkins on their laps. Her ability to transfer different textures transports the painting to a rich where the tactile and the optical have become inseparable.
In “Under the Table” it seems that the position of a small toddler right next to the table. None of the adults watch the viewer, who is not entirely a voyeur – a voyeur does not want to be discovered. Against the red walls of the room, the view slowly reveals itself. Murphy lets us look and look again without explaining what we see, and implies us in the scene; This is her genius. Her formal control is dedicated to making the ordinary inexplicable, so we look inside and think about what we see.
She is especially tailored to how seeing is chased by a consciousness of death. In “Bedwear” (2023) a red shirt, skirt with a pattern and yellow socks are laid down on a bed casually, as if they were arranged in the form of an absent body. Absence is also felt in “double bed” (2022), identical hanging paintings separated by two centimeters, depicting two pillows piled on a bed, each jumped where a head ever lay. The work was reminiscent of the last line of the poem “Dream Song 1” by John Berryman: “And empty every bed grows.”
“Harry’s Office” (2023) is a cut, close-up view of shelves crammed with paper and packages. The office is from Murphy’s husband, Harry Roseman. We seem to be bent or sitting at the desk looking for something. As calm, simple, detailed and tender as the painting is, it is underlined by an unknown sense of urgency. The palette of Geel, Browns, Beiges and Tans, accentuated with green and red, can reflect the actual office, but it calls late in the afternoon, time beyond and the unordered remains and records that inevitably lagged behind.
“Still Living” (2024) brings the viewer face to eye with a gaping cut in a tree trunk. Murphy’s meticulous attention for small, discreet parts of the tree goes against generalization and picturesque steno, and causes our attention to constantly repeat itself-look at the multi-sectioned, blocky bark, we can zero in the striped interior. From the leaves of the trees to the radiated trunk, she moves section to section and hue to Tint. The accumulation of details, and the tight balance that she maintains between each leaf and the entire position, is amazing, majestic and disturbing. As the title of the painting tells us, we investigate a exposed wound of an “still living” organism. Just like the other works that we encounter in this deeply absorbent exhibition, we can still live, but the irrefutable proof of our absence is everywhere.
Catherine Murphy: Recent work Continue in Peter Freeman, Inc. (140 Grand Street, Lower East Side, Manhattan) Until April 19. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
