447 Space is pleased to present Paradise Paradox, a survey exhibition of more than two dozen oil paintings and graphite drawings by the accomplished abstract painter Judith Murray.  This is Murray’s first solo New York venture since 2018 and highlights several critical periods of her more than five-decade career, from 1980 to the present.  Among the show’s earliest paintings are her hard-edged biomorphic forms that flirt with the natural but are more anti-natural, more fantastical than otherwise. These works are painted in a bold palette of red, yellow, white, and black which are her signature colors, her primaries, and the only colors that she uses, although this might not be readily apparent at first, so nuanced is the paint and the brushwork.

Murray’s other immutable element is a vertical bar that spans the height of the canvas placed almost invariably on its right edge.  For the most part, she uses oil on linen, a believer in the authority of painting’s historic materials. From these purposefully limited means, she has formulated an unlimited oeuvre, evolving from the imagistic to the increasingly expressive, lushly painted, light-filled works with intimations of landscape and sense of place that she is making now. Her exquisitely crafted drawings parallel that progression. Both studies and complete works in themselves, they are so finely modulated that they also seem to be bursting with color, despite using only graphite.

The most recent book on Murray’s work is now available. A survey that is also called Paradise Paradox, it has an introduction by curator and founder of P.S.1 and the Clocktower Gallery, Alanna Heiss; an essay by critic Raphael Rubinstein; and an interview with artist Will Ryman.

Judith Murray was born in New York City in 1941, holds a BFA and MFA from Pratt Institute, and did further studies in Madrid at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando. She has taught and lectured at the University of Hawaii and the New York Institute of Technology, Long Island University, Pratt Institute, and Princeton University.

Murray has had solo shows at Betty Parsons/ Jock Truman Gallery, New York; as well as at the Clocktower, New York; MoMA PS 1, New York; The Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, Texas; Sundaram Tagore Gallery, New York, among many other venues. Her work has been included in the Whitney Museum Biennial, New York; Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice Biennale, Italy, and numerous group museum exhibitions worldwide. She has travelled extensively for research purposes to Asia, particularly India, as well as to Africa, South America and elsewhere.

Murray is the recipient of a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Academy Award for Painting and a National Endowment for the Arts Award. She was inducted into the National Academy of Design in 2009 and is a member of the American Abstract Artists. Her work is in public and private collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Whitney Museum, New York; The Brooklyn Museum, New York; The Walker Art Center, Minnesota; The Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia. Murray lives and works in New York City.