Please join acclaimed abstractionist Judith Murray and Sundaram for the opening of Pure Pleasure, a major new exhibition of paintings and drawings.
Active in New York since the 1970s, Murray (b. 1941) is part of a pivotal generation of women artists whose contributions are now being reassessed by leading curators and collectors. Pure Pleasure arrives at this moment of renewed institutional and market attention, placing Murray’s work squarely within this broader re-evaluation. |
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Now 85 years old, Murray is still discovering new possibilities in abstraction. Painted at scale and with intense physicality, the paintings on view in this exhibition are replete with energy and optimism, defying any expectation of late-career restraint.
As the legendary curator Alanna Heiss once put it, “Judith has a desire to make a painting you could lie on and literally fly away into heaven. I know this may sound like a teenage 1960s 45-record, but if you are in the right room at the right time, with the right light, with the right painting of Judith Murray’s, you have a possible chance of ‘lift off.’ ” |
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Since the 1970s, Murray has rigorously limited her palette to four colors: red, yellow, black, and white. But so skillful is she in mixing these hues that only the most observant viewer would realize it. Painting on large canvases in an off-square format that can reach up to eight by nine feet, Murray juxtaposes densely layered impasto brushstrokes—made with palette knives, brushes, and rags—with a vertical bar on the right side of the canvas.
“The way I use oil paint is not only physical, but I also treat it as a sculptural medium,” Murray says. “The bar is the counter to everything else that’s going on. It’s the most modernist of all the elements. All the space moves back and forth in relation to it.” |
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Raised in Miami, Murray moved to New York in 1958 to study at Pratt Institute under the painter Walter Tandy Murch. She received early recognition when the legendary dealer Betty Parsons—known for championing Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Barnett Newman—gave her a solo show at Parsons-Truman Gallery in 1976. A review of the show in the SoHo Weekly News, one of the most influential voices chronicling cultural life in New York at the time, described Murray as “A Nonconformist Painter.” Two years later, Alanna Heiss, a pioneer in the alternative space movement, invited Murray to mount a solo show at The Clocktower, one of New York’s foremost experimental art spaces.
Murray later participated in various exhibitions at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now known as MoMA PS1) and the 1979 Whitney Biennial, as well as more than thirty group museum exhibitions, and had a solo show at the Dallas Museum of Art. Most recently, in 2025, her oil paintings and drawings were showcased in the exhibition Judith Murray: Paradise Paradox at 447 Space in New York at the invitation of artists Sean Scully and Liliane Tomasko. |
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Murray’s work is in numerous notable public and private collections, including those of The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Museum, New York; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnesota; The Contemporary Museum, Hawaii; Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut; New York Public Library; Library of Congress, Washington, DC; United States Embassy, Mumbai; and Royal Family of Abu Dhabi.
She is the recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Painting; a Guggenheim Fellowship; and National Endowment for the Arts Award. Murray was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2009. |
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Images from top:
Pleasure, 2023, oil on linen, 96 x 108 inches/243.8 x 274.3 cm
Destination, 2015, oil on linen, 56 x 60 inches/142.2 x 152.4 cm
Coast, detail, 2025, oil on linen, 40 x 44 inches/101.6 x 111.8 cm
Reflection, 2025, oil on linen, 40 x 44 inches/101.6 x 111.8 cm
Arena, 2025, oil on linen, 56 x 93 inches/142.2 x 236.2 cm |
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