Knoedler & Company

By bringing us into close contact with her subject matter, and ostensibly making us both a witness and narrator in the highly precise yet open-ended event she defines, Murphy is able to interrogate our relationship to the commonplace, to those things that are signs of our self-image. —John Yau (2008)

Knoedler & Company is proud to announce our inaugural exhibition of the work of Catherine Murphy. This exhibition of seven oil paintings and four drawings, created between 2005 and 2008, will be the artist’s first solo show in New York since 2005. The works on view represent her entire output from this three-year period.

The subjects Catherine Murphy has explored in her paintings since 2005 are deceptively simple, belying their disquieting tensions: a tightly cropped, close-up, frontal view of a gold-plated crucifix hanging between a woman’s breasts; a 4-paneled view of a squirrel approaching a sapling in the snow; four photographs torn from a teen magazine and tacked to an adolescent girl’s bedroom wall; two figures partially seen through hanging red blankets; a woman sleeping beneath a striped comforter; a view of a darkened window surrounded by holiday lights; and the flight of a cardinal reflected in a hand mirror poised in a woman’s lap. This has been a unifying quality in Murphy’s work; as she pointed out in a 2005 interview, I am an observation painter. My work is about looking very intently. That is the little curve that follows me from the very early days to now.

In his catalogue essay for this exhibition, “Hedonist of the Ordinary,” John Yau points out in Murphy’s work, the exactitude for registering the different ways the visual and physical realms coincide . . . . By making vision and tactility synonymous in her paintings and drawings, not only does the artist achieve something that is unprecedented in realist painting, but she also infuses her rigorously conceived investigations of the everyday world with an abundance of inventiveness.

The artist once stated simply, Some subjects demand to be drawings, while others demand to be paintings. And Yau writes, The integration of the visual and tactile is what her paintings and drawings share. Certainly Murphy’s intensely wrought drawings stand as a fully realized, discrete body of work. The four drawings in this exhibition, each of which took Murphy months to execute—Nuts and Shells (2005), Spill (2007), Split (2007), and Oven Light (2008)—are drawn directly from their subjects; the artist simultaneously sees and feels her way across the surface, using neither contour lines nor a grid to help her measure or negotiate the surface, creating, as she works, a constant tension between seeing and touching.

As implicated viewers, we ask: Who is bent over and looking into the oven? Who has made the cake and what is it for?... The feeling of isolation running through her work isn’t autobiographical, but common to us all. We see ourselves looking at her work, and perhaps we even gain further insight into the fundamental nature of our inescapable solitude.
—John Yau (2008)

Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1946, Catherine Murphy studied at the Pratt Art Institute in Brooklyn and at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. She was awarded an honorary doctorate by Pratt in 2006. Murphy has received numerous grants and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship (1982), grants from the National Endowment for the Arts (1979, 1989), and the Academy Award in Art, American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters (1990). She became a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 2002. Catherine Murphy has been senior critic in painting at Yale University since 1989. She had her first solo gallery exhibition in 1972, showed with Xavier Fourcade Gallery from 1975–85, and with Lennon, Weinberg, Inc. from 1989–2005. Murphy has had solo museum exhibitions at The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C. and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (1976) and Greenville County Museum of Art (1994). Her work was included in the recent (2007) exhibition co-curated by Eric Fischl and Merrill Falkenberg, All the More Real: Portrayals of Intimacy and Empathy, The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton; and is included in the current exhibition at the Katonah Museum of Art, Here’s the Thing: The Single Object Still Life, curated by Robert Cottingham.

Catherine Murphy: New Work opens to the public on Thursday, May 1, and will remain on view through Friday, August 1. Opening reception for the artist will be held on Thursday, May 1, from 6 to 8 pm. The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue (40 pages, 11 plates) with essay by John Yau. All quotes, except where noted, are from the catalogue essay.

Knoedler Project Space: Colossus and Other Men ‘o War: Sculpture by David Henderson, April 17–May 30.

For additional information or images, please contact Melissa De Medeiros at 212-794-0564, or press@knoedlergallery.com