Historic Survey Opens at UB Art Galleries
Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town
June 12-October 3, 2021
UB Anderson Gallery
1 Martha Jackson Place
Buffalo, NY
This summer the University at Buffalo Art Galleries presents the first major posthumous exhibition of work by pioneering painter Elizabeth Murray (1940–2007). This survey presents a fresh look at important themes and motifs of Murray’s five-decade career.
Elizabeth Murray: Back in Town plots the artist’s career chronologically through paintings, drawings, and prints, which reveal how the early, never-before-exhibited works she made while based in the San Francisco Bay area and later in Buffalo relate to the mature painting style that earned her critical acclaim.
The impact of the two years Murray spent in Buffalo working and teaching at Rosary Hill College (now Daemen) has previously been a footnote in her legendary career and was treated as a two-year stopover during her move from San Francisco to New York City. In Buffalo, as Murray acknowledged herself, her work “changed radically,” setting her on a path to become the bold painter known for her wildly shaped canvases—a mix of abstraction and cartoonish figuration. This survey marks 55 years since Murray’s solo exhibition at the Tomac Gallery, an artist-run gallery in Buffalo, which was in operation from 1965 to 1969.
